Purloin quarters

It's been a while since my last post here, and there is much to update, even though we are still docked in the same spot in Fort Lauderdale. Winter is over here and we are running the air conditioning now to stay comfortable, with outside temperatures creeping towards 90 during the day.


This enormous iguana lives near us and spends a lot of time on our quay. We've named him Iggy; he's popular with the tourists on the Riverwalk.

I normally arrange these posts in the order in which things happen, but this time I'm going to go a little out of sequence to get something off my chest. We have had another motor scooter stolen, the third one in just a little over a year. Considering we had the same two scooters through over a decade on the bus and the boat, across 48 states, a good part of Mexico, and the Bahamas, this is somewhat remarkable.

This time it was the same brazen thief who stole my scooter a year ago from a nearby boatyard while we were asleep just a dozen yards away. Some of you may recall he stole Louise's keys in the afternoon and returned in the middle of the night for the scooter. Apparently he still had the keys and he stole Louise's scooter two weeks ago in broad daylight while I took the boat to the pumpout. He's probably been casing us for some time.


Allegro the Vino in better times, with Eddy perched on the seat in goggles and helmet.

Mindful of the fact that we had already lost one scooter here, we've been locking the bikes to each other using cable locks. But Louise was in California, and I needed to move the boat to the pumpout without her. Good friends and professional mariners Curtis and Gill offered to help, and I separated the two scooters to reserve a scarce parking space for them. When they arrived I moved the scooters back together, but at 4 in the afternoon I left the cable locks off until after pumping out, in the interests of my volunteers' time.

I don't know if the thief was just lucky to walk by right after we pulled away from the dock, or if he's been monitoring the marine radio and heard me make my announcement that we were dropping lines and headed outbound, but security video from the condominium across the street shows him arrive just a few minutes after we pulled away. He casually walks past the bikes and looks at them to see if they are cabled together. After doing a short sprint of joy while feigning to greet someone, he circles back, inserts his stolen key, and rides off.


Career criminal stealing Louise's scooter in broad daylight.

Off course, he also got Louise's trunk, helmet, intercom/headset, rain gear, gloves, tools, fuel bottle, first aid kit, and Eddy the teddy bear who was wearing Opal's old dog helmet and Doggles at the time. He also got our last vanity plate, and now VECTOR-1, -2, and -3 are all lost forever. In a twist of irony, both cable locks we also hanging from Louise's bike, where I left them after moving my scoot for the parking space. I had to race out and buy myself a new lock right away.

We were gone for just a half hour, and as we tied back up at our slip it was Curtis who first noticed the scooter was gone. Knowing there was little to be done about it, the three of us enjoyed catching up over a beer on the aft deck before they had to leave. I called the police as soon as they pulled away, who sent a uniformed community officer to take a report.

While waiting for the officer to arrive I went into the security desk at the condo building to see if they had footage from the very prominent camera immediately across the street. They did, and it captured the whole event. The building management and security team was very understanding and helpful and they provided me with a copy of the video clip as well as a blowup still. They provided the same footage to the police.

In addition to the sense of violation and the tremendous frustration over this, it is also an enormous hassle. Louise's scooter was nearly done and due for replacement anyway, but now we have to do it under pressure. Last year we got very lucky: a replacement for my scooter was on the market nearby at a reasonable price. This time we can't find a single used scooter that fits the bill, and we'll either have to buy new or else ship something from far away. And, of course, replacing all the other items is a huge time sink. Every last bit of it will be out of pocket.

With that rant out of the way, let's catch up on the other happenings around m/y Vector since my last post.

OK, full stop. Everything above this line was typed, oh, sometime in the last week of February or so. It took a lot of emotional energy to write about the scooter theft. It was a long day, and I got as far as introducing "the rest of the post," with a full page of notes ahead of me ready to turn into narrative the next day.

It's been so long now that I don't even remember what happened the next morning to derail things. Suffice it to say I was diverted by some more urgent matter involving the boat, or the cat, or the myriad projects and medical appointments I lined up here. And then, my window of time wherein I was going to blog was gone.

Since then there has been a lot of water over the dam, my time has been overbooked, and lots of messages have come in asking if we are OK and why the hiatus on the blog. And of course, with each passing day, getting back up to date becomes more and more overwhelming. I considered a number of times declaring "blog bankruptcy," which, like "email bankruptcy" or "voicemail bankruptcy" means forgetting about everything that's past, and starting over anew. I also considered a single-line post saying merely "the end" or "thanks for reading, the blog is now done."

The reality is that we rely on this blog as our own journal, coming back over and over again to reference things we've done, seen, fixed, or broken. For example, I can only tell you exactly when the last two scooters were stolen by looking here.  By contrast, our official log book is terse and only used under way; it has four one-line entries since we arrived describing pump-out events. And so here I am, pushing through my discomfort, to resume our normal updates. This has been the single longest hiatus since I started blogging our journey in November of 2004.

That said, the update for the past two and a half months since my last entry is just too long for a single post. You don't want to read it, and I can't ever type it that way. And so I am only going to update the scooter situation, and as time permits I will get started on the rest of the story. We have just a week left on our three-month dockage contract here, and it's possible some of the update will wait until we are underway northbound in a week or so.

The follow-up to the scooter story is two-fold. First, we had to get a replacement scooter. Part of why we're here, in Fort Lauderdale, at a dock, is to get errands done that have been piling up around the boat. While some of that can certainly be done with just the single scooter that remained, that's not really how our life is organized. Knowing the chances of a recovery were slim to none, we started looking for a suitable replacement immediately. We did consider just renting a car for the remainder of our stay, since we have a free parking space. But at $250 a week or so for the cheapest option, we'd be up to the cost of a replacement scooter in about three weeks.

We started looking immediately, even before Louise returned from California. Unlike a year ago, as I mentioned earlier, there was nothing suitable on the market. And also unlike with my scooter, things in this case are complicated by the fact that the length is limited by the room available on deck. We found a number of options that simply would not fit.

I'm happy to report that a week later, in early March, a Genuine Buddy 125, about the same vintage as the stolen Vino, came up for sale in Jupiter. We jumped on it, making an appointment to see it and renting a compact pickup truck for the trip. While not perfect, it was in decent shape, ran well with performance a bit above the Vino's, and the price was right. After closing the sale the seller helped us load it, with the three of us being able to basically lift the bike into the truck. We unloaded at this end by backing up to a vacant loading dock.

The Buddy came with a tail trunk, but it was not big enough for Louise's helmet, so we sold it and ordered a larger generic brand on Amazon. By the time we bought the scoot we had already replaced Louise's helmet, helmet communicator, gloves, lock, and other accessories. We have not yet tried to lift or fit the Buddy on deck, so there may yet be a little work to do before we depart Fort Lauderdale.


Buddy and his pillion Leopold. My bear in the background, Big Daddy, is MIA.

After we had the bike in hand, Louise bought a new mascot, a tiger with wild hair that she's named Leopold. Last Sunday morning I looked out the window and noticed Leopold was on the ground; the victim, no doubt, of drunk Saturday night revelers on the Riverwalk. Sadly, my own mascot was pilfered in the same episode, adding to the long, long list of things we've had stolen or vandalized in Fort Lauderdale since our first visit in Vector.

The second postscript is the followup to the investigation. I had several exchanges with the detective assigned to the case; the FLPD has actually been less than useless in this matter. Eventually after circulating the video of the theft at the boatyard, I got the name, address, and criminal history of the suspect, and even after I supplied this to the police they did nothing. The suspect has a violent history riddled with firearms, precluding any direct action of our own.

We fully expected never to see or hear of the bike again, just as it was with the Kymco stolen last year, and in hindsight it would have been better that way. But a week ago the FLPD called to say the scooter had been recovered by the Broward Sheriff's Office, abandoned at the airport. It had been towed to Mac's Towing in Dania. I called Mac's, and we already owed $291.


Badly painted, crashed, and abused.

Not wanting to rack up more storage fees at $85 a night, we immediately headed down to Dania two-up, hoping beyond hope that it would start up and we could get it out of the yard. It was heartbreaking to see it when we first arrived; they'd ripped the trunk and luggage rack off, painted the side panels flat white, and crashed it on its left side.

Idiots that they were, they didn't bother to find the key for the locking fuel cap that had been in the trunk; instead they pried it off with a crowbar, ruining the gas tank in the process. The battery was dead, and we could not get it started with the kickstarter, probably why it was abandoned in the first place.


Rack and trim missing and fuel cap pried off.

The whole bike might have been worth $800-$900 when they stole it. In this condition, needing a fuel tank, gas cap, luggage rack, turn signal, paint, and a battery, we'd have been lucky to get $400 for it even if we could start it. After a half hour of trying, Louise made the decision to just sign the title over to the tow company. That reduced what we owed them down to just the $205 towing fee. Add that to the total amount this episode cost us, bringing it close to $1,500.

On the plus side, we recovered Louise's old riding gloves and the tool kit, and in a jaw-dropping show of stupidity, they had not even removed the personalized license plate, so we got that back, too. I opened up the battery compartment and removed the Anderson connector and pigtail that I had installed there for jump starting and battery charging, saving me some work on the replacement scoot.

Thus closes a somewhat painful chapter here at Our Odyssey. For anyone who has lost count, we have now had four scooters stolen:

1. Louise's Honda Metro, stolen by the guy with whom we consigned it.
2. My Kymco People 150, stolen in Charleston.
3. My Kymco Like 200i, stolen at Lauderdale Marine Center.
4. Louise's Yamaha Vino, stolen here on the New River.

We're now counting down the days to dropping lines here, with a last-minute scramble to finish errands, maintenance, and clean-up. By this time next week we should be off the dock and headed, or ready to head, north. We have decided this year to complete the "Great Loop" before the Illinois Waterway closure shuts it down for a season, so we'll be northbound for the Hudson River.

More Fort Lauderdale update in my next post.