University Cove-Dinner Key
June 9, 2021

Today we are "taking our sweet treasure home", to quote Jimmy Buffett. We bought this Hurricane Andrew damaged boat in 1994. We were visiting my sister in Ft Lauderdale and took a trip to Coconut Grove where we saw the boat broken and barely floating in Dinner Key. We bought the boat, had it brought to our house in Alabama and took 4 years restoring it. This boat was part of a rental fleet with this one being the mid sized boat, hence the name "tweener". Based on folklore that it is bad luck to change the name of a boat, we kept the name.

Before pulling anchor, we had a planning session. Our current chart book stops at Dinner Key. We have been to Key West before from the western coast of Florida but for the trip down the chain we are in unchartered territory. We got out the big charts, Charles got out the phone, I got the aqua maps pulled up on the iPad. For friends who think they might want to do this in the future, this is called trip planning. Based on the weather and distance between anchorages suitable for the weather conditions we realized we could not make the distance. A sailboat can make about 50 miles a day unless you are willing to go night and day. We decided to stay the inside route into Florida Bay. The only bridge we can get through to Hawk Channel is near Long Key. That means after leaving Dinner Key we must have enough provisions to stay out 3 days. Our most pressing need now is propane. Hoping Dinner Key will have some available.

We got into Dinner Key early afternoon. Charles had called earlier and spoke with someone who could barely speak English. He was told to call when we got in the the channel to the marina for a ball assignment. Thank goodness the person who answered the second call could speak English or we would have wandered aimlessly through the mooring field.

After picking up our assigned mooring ball we took the dingy to the dinghy dock. One of the reasons we chose this marina was it had a water taxi but that proved to be be false. They have 255 mooring balks so you can image the number of dinghy dock. And it was a public dinghy dock!

We walked 2 miles to a hardware store and found plenty of propane tanks. I have to admit we hoarded and bought 6. Those should last until we get back to the panhandle of Florida.

The wind picked up in the afternoon gusting to greater than 20mph. The wind was on our nose causing the boat to buck. The Captain decided he needed to put up the Wind scoop in gale force wind to cool the cabin. The Wind scoop goes in the forward hatch which is directly over my head. By midnight, my hair had nearly whipped me to death, and I felt like I had wind burn. Enough! We took it down and settled down to a nice airflow through the hatch even if we were still bouncing....