Ready for Launch to the Bahamas

February 2, 2008

By golly, we got a lot done in Vero Beach. The biggest accomplishment was to find another mechanical healer as skilled as Guy in Gloucester, this one a refrigeration expert with the unlikely name of Ty Cobb who undid the damage of earlier repairs and restored the fridge to an unprecedented level of functioning. Finally!

List of items and actions crossed off: stocked dry goods for the Bahamas from the Publix Super Market, unfolded and checked the dinghy, filled and lashed two five gallon jerry cans of extra diesel fuel to the deck, washed down the boat, cleaned the interior, changed the engine’s zinc, oil, oil filter and transmission fluid, filled the fresh water tanks, washed down and reorganized clothes closets, stored wool bedding in anticipation of leaving the cold behind, and befriended and helped a family in the slip next to us deal with “this old boat.”

The family: David and Ami and their girls, Margaret age eight and Emily age two, a cat, and Sally, a very large and friendly Newfoundland, on a 1979, 36 foot Catalina that they bought in Georgia after Christmas and have sailed and motored its 7-foot draft down the ICW with an intermittently functioning depth finder, freezing like all of the rest of us. David’s a film maker and Ami’s a designer, both from New York. Their boat, Intemperance, is pretty with a nicely curved sheer line, narrow in the bow and stern with top sides that are rounded and lean up and into the toe rail. She was a good racing boat and with the deep fin keel will out-sail and out-point Journey.

Helped them changed the oil with the loan of our hand pump to drain the sump and helped tighten the engine belt that drives the water pump and alternator on a square, big old Universal diesel. They were all set, took off the next day, only to hear over the Marina radio speaker minutes later a boat hail an approaching boat warning that it was the sail boat by marker 139 without power! The cell phone rang awhile later. It was David. The powerless sailboat was Intemperance, and we talked through why the engine was overheating. We next heard that they were heading back to the marina, this time to a mooring.

About six that evening, they brought their dinghy into shore to go for pizza and stopped by to see us. We told tales while Emily and Margaret ate trail mix like gerbils and we drank beer and wine. They had anchored three times, having thought they had the cooling problem solved only for the engine to overheat again. At one point they were forced to push the boat hand over hand along the bulwark to clear beneath a bridge, all the while Margaret was a trooper in keeping Emily entertained throughout the crisis. They honed in on a stuck thermostat, which they proudly displayed, which when removed the engine stayed running cool,.

I asked if they minded if I boiled their thermostat. which had been cleaned of some of its crud. They were puzzled for they did not see my father in 1960 or so showing brother Jim and me how to test the thermostat of our very used 1949 Studebaker by putting it in a pan of water on the stove, heating it and watching to see if it opened before the water reached boiling. Theirs did, probably because it had been cleaned. They’ll get a new one. They asked us our most harrowing experience and we comforted one another in telling stories of near misses, break downs, foolishness, and in spite of it all being unscathed and going back for more. I asked David how long he has wanted to do this, and without pause, he said “forever”.

I just finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and read about Billy Pilgrim’s capacities as a time traveler who can revisit the past and, most startlingly, visit his future, segueing and overlapping with ease events from infancy to marriage to triumphant speeches, a plane crash, even his own death. We’ve been time travelers at Vero Beach. To the left on the time line, our past youth on display in the crew of Intemperance, taking on this old boat with such energy, and my father in the kitchen in Cedar Rapids, Iowa boiling a thermostat.

To the right on the time line we traveled to our future, disconcertingly looming in the Publix Super Market on a weekday mid afternoon where Florida’s geriatric set shuffles the aisles, using their shopping carts as walkers or humming by in electrified scooters, a man with a bandage over one eye helping his wife with a brace on her leg, others dazed and blinded by the light of the parking lot, a woman shuffling behind a cart with the frozen expression of Parkinson’s disease. Some combination of their futures is likely our futures.

Those lines of past and future lift like the edges of a funnel to tip the ingredients of the youthful adventures of Intemperance’s crew, boiling the thermostat, and the ancient couples supporting one another in the aisles of Publix into the vessel of this moment in this journey and make it all the more rich.

We left Vero Beach early this morning (February 2nd), feeling in order, made our way to Stuart into a lagoon called Manatee Pocket, very shallow, zero feet under the keel and moored at Pirates Cove Marina.

February 4, 2008 – Side Trip

We had e-mailed our friend Steve H. who spends a good deal of the winter in Florida in either Juno Beach which is near by Stuart or in Key West to see if we could connect. Steve is member in good standing of an informal sailing group, but his craft are of the air. He offered to fly in his plane from Key West to Stuart, pick-us up and fly us back to Key West for the weekend to watch the Super Bowl, then back to Stuart.

What a trip to see the Keys from the air, including a view we think of Roland B’s place on Key Largo from 7,500 feet, to spend time with Steve and his friends in Key West, toot around the island on bicycles and visit the most southern point in the US and the end of US Route 1, a highway which we have lived close to for 35 of the last 38 years as we migrated from Washington, DC to Baltimore, to Boston, to Maine. It was great to watch that game with people who could comfort one another over its outcome and to sleep in a real bed in his beautiful home.

We have settled into a marina in North Palm Beach, four miles north of the inlet to the sea that will take us to the Bahamas. Roland B. ships on tonight to join us for the Gulf Stream crossing and the first week in the Bahamas. The weather promises rare and ideal southerly winds.

We passed the 1000 mile marker on the ICW and we are anxious to leave its confines after negotiating the opening of eight bridges today, a record, dodging an increasing number of ridiculous boats, and seeing the umpteenth McMansion.
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The next post will be via wifi when available in the Bahamas. Stay tuned.