Water water everywhere...
17 March 2010 | Marine Stadium anchorage, Miami
Terry
We now have a machine that turns ocean salt water into sweet tasting fresh water. It buzzes and hums and makes a bit of a racket and great tasting fresh water flows out into our water tanks at 14 gallons per hour. No more having to plan which marina to stop at next to refill our tanks.
So the engine stuff is good to go and our water maker is finished. While the "boat list" is of course never done.... It would appear our refit tasks and mandatory list of stuff that had to be complete before we cross the gulf stream is finished. (it helps that I took a couple of pages of this list and fed them to the fish)
Surreal, can it be that we are ready to cross? It seems like we have been stuck in boat hell limbo for a lifetime and the reality that we may be crossing to the Bahamas in a matter of days is a little tough to grasp. Nobody is really accepting it, we all half expect some new and ever more disastrous boat malfunction to delay our fun and further rape our cruising kitty.
That does seem to have been our cruising story so far. The brand new water maker I installed of course had problems when we first tested it yesterday. JT Halden who is a Spectra water makers dealer and who sold me my unit (at a great price btw...) came out to the boat yesterday to double check my installation and walk me through all the procedures of running this machine. JT is a super nice guy, we all enjoyed having him on the boat and his knowledge of this stuff is pretty stunning. He is the MAN when it comes to water makers. (contact JT at 954-515-7077. If your looking for a water maker.... Call him. Period. Just do it. You will not be sorry).
We fired the new unit up and it leaked. Not from any of the fittings I installed but from the main end cap on the membrane housing. This is a spot JT has never seen a leak from before. So he pulled the thing apart and removed the membrane and we found it clogged up with funky looking crap. It looked like some sort of algae growth or something. This was a brand new unit, never run and supposedly pickled with preservative at the factory yet it was so clogged up that water would not flow properly through it and the increased pressure was causing the leak past a large "O" ring. JT was very surprised at this and has never seen anything like it, ever.
That just made me chuckle. A new sort of mechanical failure in a part that "never fails"..... yup, sounds like the "Lillie Mae" all right!
Anyhow it was really no big deal as JT came back out to the boat early this morning with a brand new membrane, installed it and we tested everything just fine. It really is nice to work with someone who does not give any excuses but just makes things right. I can tell you better than most anyone.... That is a VERY rare thing in the marine field. Thanks JT!
The "Marine Stadium" anchorage has really not been as great as we hoped. There is pretty much no place to go ashore here. The marina right next door has a small dinghy dock but they have giant signs everywhere making it clear that this dock is for marina customers only and the marina employee who was there when I puttered by made it pretty clear we were not welcome. I did motor away before he opened fire, which I think disappointed him.
The "Manatee Scam" is going on down here too. They have lots of the slow speed zone signs in various apparently randomly chosen places and the authorities track down manatee terrorists and ticket them. Maybe the Miami Manatees can read and this strategy works better down here but I doubt it. I still think the Manatee school idea is worthy of Obama funding. Illiterate manatees deserve to read too !
I have also been told that the authorities around here do not like folks anchoring out in certain places. It seems lots of very wealthy and famous people live around here and they enjoy their views of the water sans sailboats with semi-naked fat guys hanging out on the stern belching or worse. Now, the Florida supreme court recently ruled that municipalities cannot outlaw anchoring out or put restrictions on anchoring UNLESS they provide a regulated and managed mooring field. I am sure cities are scrambling like mad to get these new "tax the feller behind the tree" mooring fields in place but in the meantime they are not supposed to hassle folks anchoring out.
Well, apparently they do anyhow. I guess when a guy with a gun and a badge comes to your boat and orders to you to move it now the fact that some court somewhere is in your corner takes a back seat to not getting shot. That's the way I see it anyhow. If Madonna asks me to move.... I have no problem with that.
My solution to this sort of stuff is very easy however: Leave. Go somewhere that welcomes boaters and is setup to cater to them rather than view them as a sort of non- local voting tax source. The Bahamas is this place!
I am still dealing with some property management issue with our rental properties. A couple are not occupied and are getting repairs but this should all be moving forward without needing me by the weekend. This has been one area of the "grand plan" that has not gone as I anticipated.
Wait a minute..... NONE of the "Grand Plan" has gone as I anticipated.
But the rental properties thing has been a bit of a mess. It seems I am a poor judge of how good a tenant will be or not be. I had one guy who waved a big wad of cash in my face for the deposit and first months rent and he told a good story so I signed him up. Less than a year later, after missing 2 months rent and after I have eviction legal proceedings well under way he calls me from jail. Turns out its hard to pay rent when your in jail.... But of course none of it was his fault! He did finally manage to get his stuff out of the house and when we got in we discovered a scene worthy of a Steven King novel. New forms of life were evolving rapidly in the primordial slime left behind in the basement. Rats could not even survive there, as proven by the rat carcasses rotting and stinking up the place. It really amazes me how some people live. Anyhow, like most problems its all solved with enough money!
I have learned a lesson from that stuff: pay a professional to do full background checks and ensure that I get good tenants. That is what I am doing now.
Tomorrow we hope to motor out of here, go under the Rickenbacker causeway bridge and head into Biscayne Bay. We will motor around to the other side of Virginia Key and anchor so we can take the dinghy in to see the big Miami Seaquarium. Its apparently a pretty impressive facility and has lots to keep the kids engaged. Plus, I am sure we can spend a ton of money there and since its been several days since we spent any money we are suffering deep withdrawal symptoms. Michele was chewing on a quarter earlier today and Taylor was planning some sort of Nigerian email scam so I think we need to get off the boat and blow a few bucks.
If the weather plays out as forecast and if I can get all my paperwork T's crossed and I's crossed we hope to cross to the Bahamas on Saturday morning. We would plan to stage down Biscayne Bay near No Name Harbor and motor out around 2am. We would then cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. There are MANY possible routes and I am still researching exactly which way we will go. At this point.... I am leaning toward crossing to Gun Cay and anchoring up. We would then leave out early the next day to cross the Great Bahama Bank to Northwest Channel light and go south a mile or so and anchor OR if we still have enough daylight continue on toward Chubb Cay. We shall see. Regardless our goal is to get toward the Exumas and George Town as quickly as we can.
The photo is of the kids helping to polish the deck back in Riviera Beach. Jackson REALLY wanted the new Pokemon game for his Nintendo DS thingy and so he had to earn it. And he did! He really busted his butt working on the boat for most of the day. Taylor helped too.
I also posted a few new pictures in a gallery. This includes a couple of shots of our view of Miami, the sail down from West Palm Beach and our tour of the HMS Bounty. Not the real one... (burned at Pitcairn Island by Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers) but the tall ship built for the 1961 movie starring Marlon Brando and used in lots of other movies like Master and Commander and Pirates of the Caribbean. It was tied up at Peanut Island and we had fun checking it out.