In the land of endless summer

We are under way southbound in the ICW headed for Fort Lauderdale from Palm Beach. We've been in Palm Beach nearly three weeks, and therein lies a tale. [Update: We are in Fort Lauderdale; I had to set the post aside yesterday.]

Vector peeking through the palms at the Coral Ridge Yacht Club.

When last I posted here we were at sea, headed for Lake Worth inlet. We arrived through the inlet and to our intended anchorage, adjacent to the Sailfish Club, so early that we opted to just keep going all the way to Palm Beach. We had to kill time to wait for the opening of the Flagler bridge, and we hovered in the unmarked "crossover" channel east of the Rybovich yard for ten minutes, making the 4:15 opening at Flagler.

The anchorage just south of the inlet seems to get more crowded every year, and this time through there was a boat anchored basically in the marked channel that runs along the east side of the lagoon. I'm sure at some point he was treated to the blast of a superyacht horn, as they need to use that channel instead of the ICW.

Vector anchored in the Lake Worth lagoon, as seen from the Royal Park bridge. We are anchored in Palm Beach, at right, but we go ashore in West Palm Beach at left.

It was a tight fit, but we had the anchor down near our usual spot (map) by 4:30, splashed the tender, and headed ashore to long-time favorite Lynora's on Clematis Street for dinner. Afterwards we took a nice stroll around town after being cooped up in the boat all day. It was a clear evening and I was hoping for a distant view of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket launch, but it was scrubbed and would eventually launch on a completely overcast night.

One tiny fraction of the exotic car show.

The dinghy was nearly out of fuel when we arrived, and normally I would have just run over to the fuel dock at the Palm Harbor Marina to gas it up. Yes, it's expensive, but the tank only holds three gallons. While they had diesel, the marina was either out of or no longer sells gasoline, I could not tell which, and so I grabbed a Jerry jug and headed ashore at Clematis for the long hike to the Marathon station and back. I tied up behind the two USCG patrol boats, with fully loaded machine guns mounted, and then ran smack into the closing day, open to the public, of the exotic car show.

These Coasties at the show are just awaiting orders, their armed patrol boats waiting at the dock. Later they zoomed past us on their way to close the ICW under the Southern Boulevard Bridge, which leads to Mar-a-Lago. I imagined these guys sprinting down the dock when the call came in.

Here in the Palm Beaches you see exotic cars every day, and you're more likely to be run over by a Bentley than a Toyota while crossing the street. But still this show was over the top, and off the cuff I would estimate well over $100M in cars at the show. Doc Brown even showed up from 1985 in his DeLorean time machine.

Outdoor ice skating! Not surprising in most of the country in January, but this is the Palm Beaches, in front of The Ben hotel.

After picking my way through the car show I eventually made it to the gas station, fetched a couple gallons of gas, then picked my way back through the show on my way home. I arrived back at Vector just at the turn of the tide, wherein we learned a nearby sailboat was on a very long scope and it looked like we might be overlapping. We weighed anchor and moved 30 yards closer to the channel (map).

Our new swing circle came close to this sign, which I had to mark on the chart.

The dinghy thus fueled up, we settled in for what we knew might be a long stay. We had arrived a full three days early, as we so often do in the boat when being late is not an option, for the real reason we were here: an orthopedist appointment I had set up for Wednesday, within walking distance of the dock.

Top-balancing the vacuum cleaner batteries, one of my many projects.

I've been having some pain in my neck (there's a joke in there somewhere) for a couple of years now, and, more recently, a back injury from decades ago has returned to haunt me. Sometime in the past year I decided I needed to do something about it once we got back to Florida, where our health insurance is based.

The minuscule ice rink was festive after dark.

I started looking for doctors when we were still north of Florida, and we considered Jacksonville, where we know things are convenient, and Key West, where we want to end up for at least part of the season. Ultimately we decided that Jacksonville was too cold, and there are just not enough in-network providers in the Keys with availability, so instead we settled on the middle ground of West Palm beach, where it is finally warm enough, there's a good anchorage with easy shore access, and there is no shortage of health care. Surprisingly it is also not overbooked, and it was easy to make appointments.

On my first walk through town I had to divert around a bomb scare, at the police parking garage.

In the couple of days leading up to my appointment I explored the town to see what was new. The convenient downtown Amazon locker is gone, a fact we learned en route, and that turned out to be due to the fact that the LA Fitness in which it was located has closed up shop. Lots of construction there at City Place (formerly Rosemary Square, formerly City Place -- apparently the new name did not stick), with the entirety of the centerpiece Harriet Himmel Theater, in the historic Methodist church, fenced off for renovations.

Restoration of the historic First United Methodist church, now a theater surrounded by City Place.

One of our favorite joints, Il Bellagio, was on the first floor of that structure and has been relocated across the courtyard to one of the more modern buildings. The entire wing of the complex across Hibiscus Street, which housed a multi-screen cinema, some restaurants, and other retail has been razed completely and will be the site of a new office tower. The colorful animated banyan tree is still there, along with the very popular splash fountain.

This "pop up" shopping center, all luxury brands, made of shipping containers occupied the empty lot where the move theaters stood; a few days after I snapped this it was gone altogether.

Also leading up to my appointment I made more than one dinghy trip a mile south to the El Cid dock, which is a three quarter mile walk to the nearest Amazon locker. Amazon also delivers to the UPS store in town, but with a longer lead time. I would make several trips to this dock over the course of our stay, including a couple with Louise wherein we also shopped at the Publix there, had lunch at Donte's Diner (very good) and dinner at Taqueria Guerrero, where the hand-written signs are in Spanish and the food was excellent.

Authentic and inexpensive Mexican food is to be had in the working class neighborhood just inland of El Cid.

A couple of those trips were necessitated by the project to replace the engine mounts on the generator, a project which also started before my ortho appointment I described this project in great detail in my last post, so no need to go over it again here.

Flux at the El Cid dock. We have to be here at high tide to get off and on.

When Wednesday rolled around I hiked up to the medical building, which is sandwiched between Good Samaritan Hospital, to which it is attached, and a different professional building where I had had my eye surgery a decade ago. It's all so familiar. As I had hoped, the clinic was well equipped and had its own digital x-ray machine, and so right off they took x-rays of my cervical and lumbar spine.

This "art park" called CityZen Garden is a public space on private property.

The doctor spent no more than five minutes with me, giving me the expected diagnosis: I'm old and creaky. Also as expected, I came away with scripts for some meds and a bunch of physical therapy (PT). A physician's assistant finished out the visit to explain the it all. I now also have a neck traction machine recommended by my physical therapist, and delivered by Amazon to the UPS store downtown, as well as a pillow she recommended, delivered the same way.

We passed by the free Clematis By Night concert, held every Thursday, three times. None of the artists moved us to stay more than a few minutes.

This particular orthopedic group has its own PT arm, and it was a short elevator ride back down to the third floor to set up an initial appointment, which they were able to set for Friday. At that appointment they did an initial evaluation and then jumped right in, and I was able to set up six more appointments over the following two weeks, expressing the hope that, by then, I would be far enough along to wrap up and get back underway.

These free outdoor exercise machines (mostly in shadow in the background; sorry) are in Jose Marti park and work by adjustable air cylinders.

And that, in a nutshell, is how we ended up in Palm Beach for nearly three weeks. In fact, my last appointment had been scheduled for today, with a MWF schedule each week. That would have had us here over the weekend for a southbound departure on Monday -- we try to avoid traveling the ICW in SE Florida on the weekends, at nearly all costs.

123 Datura Bar & Kitchen has the largest disco ball I have ever seen; it was easily 3' across.

That plan was foiled earlier in the week when we learned that the pump-out on the fuel dock at the lone marina here, Palm Harbor, is still down, even though it had been down when we called before leaving Fort Pierce. Apparently they had to remove the pump and send it out for repairs. As we were rapidly approaching the limit of our capacity -- we can go just about three weeks on a tank -- we had a mad scramble earlier this week to come up with an alternate plan.

This giant inflatable, umm, cat? was out in front of the convention center during an art exhibition.

One option was to motor an hour north to Riviera Beach where we could pump out for $15. Another was to motor out the Lake Worth Inlet and go three miles offshore. Either way it would be around a three-hour trip and burn from 5-9 gallons of diesel. It also meant possibly losing our good spot in the anchorage while we were gone.

Cleaning up the workshop I got around to failure analysis on a toilet controller. This relay had welded itself shut, causing the macerator to run continuously. You can see the scorched "weld" mark on the contact.

In the end, what made the most sense was just to move my final PT appointment up to tomorrow afternoon, and get underway this morning to Fort Lauderdale, where we knew there were multiple pump-out options. We did not have the weather to make the trip on the outside, so here we are, running the gauntlet of 15 drawbridge openings, most of which we have to time, on our way to Fort Lauderdale.

We sometimes heard events in the Meyer amphitheater all the way out in the anchorage, such as the Komen breast cancer event. I stumbled into some sort of youth dance competition. West Palm Beach runs an extensive civic event program.

In the course of our stay I tried to get out walking a few miles every day, including the two-plus mile round trip to PT three times a week. On two of those days I had to dodge raindrops both ways, but lucked out on the timing and missed the heaviest rain each time. The UPS Access Point is at the CVS across the street from PT, and I stopped there more than once to pick up our mail and some other items we had shipped.

Every festival event had the streets blocked off with heavy equipment, a precaution in the wake of numerous terror incidents involving vehicles driven into festivals, most recently in Germany.

One day I opted to make the circuit of the lagoon, which involves crossing from the upscale part of West Palm Beach into the stratospheric Palm Beach proper. Hand in hand with the large jump in income and property values on the east side of the lagoon, there is a noticeable shift in vibe. The little electric shuttles that ply downtown West Palm would bring us here for $5, opening up a vast array of additional restaurants, but, honestly, it just doesn't call us. Even for my birthday dinner I could not find a place in Palm Beach that I just had to try.

Vector against the West Palm skyline, from the lakefront walk on the Palm Beach side.

On one of my visits ashore I stumbled into the enormous Saturday GreenMarket, which spans from the waterfront all the way to Quadrille, four city blocks that are closed for the event. Lots of food stalls, a very little bit of farmers' market, and more tchotchkes and snake oil than you can count. I was tempted by the food and also the availability of bottomless mimosas, but resisted the urge. The junk-for-sale never calls us, and even the mimosas were aced out by the requirement to first buy the plastic stemware in which they are served.

On a warm Saturday the GreenMarket was packed.

When I was not walking or doing PT I tried to knock a few things off the project list. Besides the generator repairs I did a big clean-up and organization in the workshop. I repaired my small torque wrench that had quit mid-project while I was rebuilding the transfer switch, and rebuilt and replaced the original engine room fan, which broke well over a year ago and for which a lower-capacity (but also quieter) model has been standing in ever since.

It's cheaper to just buy a bottle of champagne than one of these bottomless Mimosa's

During our second week a sailboat came in and anchored in our swing circle; I was out on errands at the time and Louise had to bark at them, to no effect. When I got back I could see on my approach that they were too close, and after chatting with Louise about it I went over in the tender to see them about it. I, too, was brushed off.

I thought this an appropriate choice to block off the end of the festival.

We spent the next 36 hours being nervous about it and watching them studiously during every tide change. But it's impossible to be up and available for every turn of the tide, and at 4am on Martin Luther King day the inevitable happened and they ran into us, taking a chunk of our new paint off the swim step, clear down to bare aluminum. We were both up in a flash, and I now regret stopping to put pants on before running up the stairs. They got an earful from both of us, promising to come by in the morning to sort it out before weighing anchor and moving.

Collision at anchor.

In the morning they came over with insurance and contact information, and I have every reason to believe they will cover the damage, but this is going to be a giant pain in the butt for us. We can find someone to take care of it in Fort Lauderdale, but that would have us there for days or weeks and we really just want to be passing through. We'll see if we can find a mobile repair in Key West, or else we'll try to deal with it on the way north. If it will be a while, I will slap something on it to keep it from spreading in the interim.

There is a coffee stand in the public library, against conventional wisdom.

This can be a chaotic anchorage, and we did see boats drag during the couple of days of high winds. At least one boat ended up in the middle of the channel, and the parade of tug boats that's been moving gravel from Peanut Island to our north down to the Bonefish Cove environmental mitigation project to the south has been mighty annoyed. At one point the Coast Guard hailed us to ask us about one of the boats in the channel -- they can see us on AIS and we looked to be close.

I had to go to the top floor in search of a copier and found this very pleasant seating space and workstations with power outlets.

One of the bright spots of our enforced downtime was a visit from good friends Erin and Chris on Barefeet, whom we had left behind in Jacksonville. They passed through en route to Fort Lauderdale for their departure to the Bahamas, and long time readers may remember that this time last year we and they were on similar schedules and kept intersecting at many points along the way. A weather delay had them here for two nights, anchored just a stone's throw from us, and we had two nice evenings with them. At this writing they are already in the Exumas.

Barefeet, with the blue hull, is our neighbor. At left is some kind of live-aboard made from two lashed-together pontoon boats and plywood, making its way through the anchorage with a tiny outboard.

We managed to get out for dinner every night of our stay. Many evenings it was shirtsleeve weather and we were able to dine al fresco, but on the flip side we had a couple of nights of making our way through drizzle to get ashore. We ate at many of our old standbys including Lynora's, Kabuki Sushi & Thai, Grease, Batch, Il Bellagio, and O'Shea's. We also returned for one more try to Rocco's Tacos; the third time is the charm and on this visit the food and service were fine. I picked up bagels a few times from Makeb's, an old favorite now in a new location, and we even went in together once for breakfast sandwiches.

At CVS. How you know you are near the beach in Florida.

We also tried some new venues for us. Elisabetta's Ristorante turned out to be quite good and less expensive than I had imagined, but next time we'll skip the canolli, which were weird. Felice, an upscale Italian place in the new-ish complex across from Publix was not worth the higher price, with few salad options and no drafts, even though the food itself was fine. Leila was a tasty option for Mediterranean cuisine in a nice setting. Rivales was decent on Taco Tuesday but is courting a more boisterous crowd. Hot Pie was excellent for coal-fired pizza. And 123 Datura surprised us with half off the entire check at happy hour, with good food and drink if a bit of a limited menu.

Zoom in to see the SpaceX Falcon-9 launching the SpainSat mission.

On my birthday we went to another old standby, City Cellar overlooking the light-up banyan at City Place. It was wine-down Wednesday and I ended up finishing most of a bottle of pinot noir by myself, to go with an excellent filet. I sometimes forget this is a fine dining establishment masquerading as a pub.

The top of the animated banyan "Wishing Tree" from our table at City Cellar. I have posted video of this tree previously.

On one of my many walks I stopped into the RH Rooftop restaurant, atop RH (formerly Restoration Hardware) as well as the Treetop restaurant atop the Canopy By Hilton, judging neither to be really worthy of a dinner-time stop. And I also stopped in to the pour-it-yourself Garden District Taproom, finding it very overpriced, and with no food at all save for the occasional food truck.

Someone at RH has to rake the gravel all over the outside spaces. It looks like a full-time job.

Update: We are docked at the Coral Ridge Yacht Club (map), where we get a free reciprocal night. It is now Saturday, as the aforementioned gauntlet of timed bridges precluded me from finishing the blog post yesterday. I somehow messed up the timing of the one bridge that opens on the 20s rather than the quarter or half hour, adding a full hour to the trip and landing us here after 5pm.

Vector and the anchorage as see from Treetop atop the Canopy by Hilton. The Breakers Palm Beach is at left.

We went right to the casual poolside dining at the club and had a nice dinner. The temperature here is in the 80s, a stark contrast considering I wore my parka to PT one day. The pool bar is a happening place, going well into the evening last night, and as I type the place is buzzing for lunch and the pool deck is packed. Between that and a post-prandial walk, including a stop at the Publix to pick up milk, I was too whooped to finish last night.

We passed USCGC Hudson doing ATON maintenance.

There is a section of this trip where the bridges are tightly spaced but with timing that is completely wrong for Vector's speeds. I have to work hard to station-keep in the heavy current, complicated yesterday by 20mph winds, and it takes a lot out of both of us.

New islands under construction for the Bonefish Cove project. Tugs Aunt Donna, Captain Morgan, and Wiley passed us both ways every day.

This morning I dragged the pump-out cart over to the boat and took care of business, so we are set for the rest of the trip to the Keys. We've decided to just spring for a second night here (only the first is free) so Louise can get all the laundry done without unnatural acts, and tonight we will stroll the mile to what I consider the best Italian place in all of Fort Lauderdale, Serafina. Most likely we will move to an anchorage in the morning; I was happy to find the annoying and illegal "no anchoring" buoys in the anchorage right next door have finally been removed, two years after I filed a complaint with the marine police.

We were passed by several new-build boats on delivery, fresh off the ship in Riviera Beach and headed to commissioning. Even the top and rails are still strapped down and if you zoom in you can see the delivery crew out in the open in the little helm stand on top.

We were able to score reservations at the municipal marina in Key West starting on the 8th, which gives us a comfortable schedule from here, down to Key Biscayne on the inside and then out to Hawk Channel by way of Cape Florida. My next post will most likely be under way to Key West. Now if you will excuse me, I need to go exercise with my rubber bands. The full set would take me an hour and a half, so I am doing a third to half of them every day to mix it up.