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The Conch Republic
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Sunday, October 25, 2009
The flight out of Fort Lauderdale
to Key West
is on board a small, twin-engine prop plane that has the vibration and
the engine noise of a byegone era.
Through the small portholes, I can see the aquamarine shallowness of
reef-studded waters surrounding the Keys. Puffy clouds float by,
not below us so much as right next to the plane, close enough to look
real.
I am one of four passengers. Each row of seats consists of two,
one on each side. There are perhaps a dozen such rows and only
four of us are using them. Two people are tucked into the back
row and I am sitting directly above the port wing, with my knapsack on
the seat across the isle from me. The next row back is occupied
by Don and his luggage, arranged in mirror image to mine. When I
twist and look over my shoulder I can easily talk with Don who happens
to be in the yacht trade. He lives in the Tampa area and for the last twelve
years has been delivering power boats to scattered locations throughout
the eastern US. He is flying to Key West
to pick up a 65' power boat and take it back to Tampa. He'll get
off the plane in Key West, take a taxi
to the harbor a mile or so away, step aboard the yacht, fire up the
engines, and set off for Tampa.
He
expects
to
arrive
there
tomorrow.
He has no crew with him but
there are guests of the owner on board who will be able to help him
with handling lines.
According to Don, docking of such a vessel is much easier than I could
ever have imagined. The drive train consists of three separate
propellers that at slower speeds can be pivoted to point in any
direction through 360 degrees. The steering is done, he says,
with a joy stick that by being maneuvered through any blend of
front-to-back and right-to-left can cause the boat to power forward,
sideways, or backward, depending on the joy stick's orientation.
Don talks to me about all this in a conversational tone that somehow
mutes the remarkable nature of what he is telling me. When I
think of how stressful it is for me to maneuver little Kobuk in
close quarters, I can't help but sit in stunned astonishment
contemplating what money can buy.
When we disembark from the plane onto the tarmac in Key West, I feel the weight of the
heat pressing me into a near-catatonic state. It is not really so
hot; I'm just not used to this. A pink taxi takes me to Kings
Pointe Marina
and by well before noon I am standing next to the shuttered door of
Keys Yamaha looking at Kobuk. She sits outside on blocks
and on her stern is mounted a new bracket for the outboard and a new,
20-horse Yamaha to replace the reliable old 9.9 that has pushed Kobuk
through the 8,500 miles that she has covered since leaving Wyoming over
four years ago. I arranged for all this by phone with Camilo, the owner of Keys Yamaha. He has
sold me the new engine and mounted the new bracket. Now that I am
here and can open the cabin, he will be able to install the new
controls as well. But that will have to wait until tomorrow since
today is Sunday and Keys Yamaha is closed. I climb aboard and
take a look around. Kobuk is beginning to show her age,
but looks to still be serviceable. If I were a young buck, I
would rush to repaint her and reoil all
the mahogany, but the sun beats down and I feel enervated by the heat
and the lack of sleep during last night's redeye flight from Salt Lake City.
I
crawl
into
the
bunk
up
forward and take a nap.
A few hours later, somewhat resuscitated, I reinflate
the tires on Bike Friday and pedal off to see if the biggest little
town in Florida
is as I remember it. Yes, it is. It is only about four in
the afternoon, well before sunset, but the bars along Duval Street
already pulsate with the live music. The sun shines, but one can
almost feel the eager anticipation of sunset when the lights of the
downtown create a golden bower beyond which the sky and the distance
are nothing but darkness. Indeed, I can still see the slanting
rays of the sun when the lights start to come on.
In the middle of the evening I am walking along a side street when two
men sitting at the sidewalk table of an open air bar speak to me and
insist on buying me a beer so that I will sit down and talk with
them. Mark and Dave are their names. Mark is so drunk that
he cannot finish a sentence, but Dave is quite coherent and spends some
time telling me how he managed to end up in Key West after growing up
in Wisconsin. He is convinced that he will never leave
here. He arrived only five months ago but he seems certain that
this is his place. If only he can find a job.
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Monday, October 26 - Thursday, December 3, 2009
The whole idea was for Key West to be just
another stop along the way. Granted that storing Kobuk here for eight months was
bound to cause a rash of repair and maintenance issues, but I really
thought the problems would be minor since the the to-do list when I
left last February was so short. I arrived here believing that Kobuk would be prepped and ready to
fly in just four or five days. She had been in protected storage
and the big jobs that needed to be done on her were supposed to have
been completed by people here on site before my arrival. Well,
the unforseen occurs. We end up paralyzed here in King's Pointe
Marina for almost six weeks. By the time we start voyaging there
are only ten days left before I have to return to Utah again.
"So what's the problem, Spike?" This
is the question my friends all ask when I return to snow and
winter. In their view, it is unseemly to complain about being
"stuck" in a place like Key West. They're right, actually.
It isn't so bad. My arrival here in late October coincided with
the start of Fantasy Fest, an annual Key West event that lasts over a
week and that I had no idea existed. Fantasy Fest is this small
town's willful attempt to outdo Mardi Gras, and in my humble view it
succeeds in certain respects. I cannot believe that the New
Orleans crowd manages to systematic ally achieve, day after day, as high a
level of cold, stone drunkenness. It cannot be that Bourbon
Street achieves a more continual, twenty-four hours per day
revelry. Maybe the New Orleans music is better and more authentic
but it certainly isn't any more varied or continual. And besides,
although New Orleans is in the south it is not as tropical as Key West: the people there would suffer from
exposure if they were to wander around nude all day drinking beer and
umbrella drinks -- standard party practice here at Fantasy Fest.
Such behavior is considered perfectly good form. The only thing is, you're supposed
to substitute body paint. The laborious toilette that must be
undertaken in order to be presentable to the general public is so
extravagant and so painstaking that the intervening 50 weeks of the
year must require constant planning and preparation. There's good
reason to think that the real
competition for Fantasy Fest is not Mardi Gras but Rio's Carnival.
You can tell that the people here are
professional partiers. They all seem to have mastered the art of
drinking too much without falling down or getting sick. They have
trained their police to treat drunks tenderly. They seem to have
genetically selected for "good drunk" behavior. It is really
quite remarkable that so many people can be so juiced up without all
sorts of unpleasant things happening. I saw no quarrels and no
fist fights. People tipsied their way along Duval Street without
screaming or making obscene gestures. I wouldn't go so far as to
say that the place was orderly, but it certainly didn't decend into
chaos. Everybody is out to party and they appear to believe that
this objective can best be achieved if all drunks are treated as equal
before the bar.
Duval Street is the center of the action, of course, and at all times, day or
night, pedestrians rule. The crowds are so great for this small
place that a constancy of flow and counterflow fills the street and
both sidewalks. Open patches of pavement momentarily appear, only
to be consumed in seconds by the milling crowd. If you wish to
stand still, you will have to find an eddy, a protective obstacle of
some sort that deflects the passers by and creates a sort of dead spot
in the action. After my third or fourth beer I begin to view the
search for these kinds of spots as good training for guiding Kobuk against a contrary
current. The music penetrates everywhere, but with the sort of
unpre dictability of competing radio station
signals in their zones of broadcast overlap. The street is lined
with bars, of course. This is true even when Fantasy Fest is not
under way. Perhaps every second building is something other than
a bar, but during the event the non-bars become little more than
pseudo-bars where the overflow from neighboring establishments spills
their drinks on the floor as they stagger around gazing stupidly at the
jewellery or T-shirts or ice cream coolers.
The Keys in general are inhabited by an
underclass of dropouts, losers, and ne'er-do-wells. Even your
respectable citizens -- your mayors and school principles and family
physicians -- are presumed to be flawed individuals with not just any
old skeleton in the closet but their very own personal one.
"Reputable" is a suspect word in this part of the world and anybody who
smacks of it is presumed to be either a sham, an outsider, or
hypocritical. When Fantasy Fest is on, countless outsiders from
mainstream America arrive in town and give the place a glossy veneer
that otherwise does not exist. And believe me -- those attracted
from outside to attend this sort of event are not what you would call
model citizens. The scene is perversely fascinating, so rich in
color and queerness that an ordinary person, unaccustomed to such
blatant contrariness, finds overwhelming. That is when you have
to take a break and do something less bizarre like tour Hemingway's
home or visit the Mel _____ museum of _____.
As long as Fantasy Fest was on, I found distraction from the
plight of Kobuk, but once it
ended I had to confront the problems at hand. The main problem is
that the Mazda won't start. It did start when Kobuk was first relaunched but the
following morning when I said goodbye to everybody and prepared to cast
off lines for the next attempt to cross to the  Bahamas,
the engine
would not start. I spend over a month trying to resolve this
small glitch in the system. A week it takes to absolutely isolate
the problem as emanating from the control computer, and the only
recourse is to ship it back to Rotary Power Marine Corporation in New
York. John Lauter repairs it and tests it and returns it to me (a
one-week turnaround) and I reinstall it. The engine fires up
without hesitation, but then a few hours later the same old problem
recurs: it won't start. Once again, the computer must be returned
and once again John repairs and tests it -- with logical explanations
for the new source of internal circuit failure. When I get it
back (and this time it takes longer than a week) and remount it in the
engine area, I am sceptical about the prospects for trouble-free engine
operation. But the engine does start and during the day I start
it a number of times with no hesitation before it fires. The next
morning I motor over to the gas dock to top off the fuel before
departing. The fuel bill is paid. I step aboard and turn
the key -- and the engine won't start. For a third time the
computer gets removed and sent back to its source. This time, the
computer gets replaced. A new one costs over a thousand dollars,
but John sells me a used one that has only a handful of hours on it and when at last I
receive it in the mail and put it back in the result is
satisfactory. But by now it is December.
My good friend Dick Gardner had made plans
to join me for the crossing to the Bahamas but the litany of Kobuk delays forced their
postponement until at last we agreed to a mid-November rendezvous in
Miami. I was convinced that by then the engine would be fixed and
our progress up the Keys would be well along. I was wrong and in
the end Dick had to take a bus down from Miami. He spent a week
aboard and we did daily bicycle trips into Key West, but by the time he
had to leave the mechani cal issue was no closer to resolution than it
had been when he arrived. Kobuk
had been caught in a time warp and I was numbly awaiting my personal
decline into senility.
When at last
the replacement computer had resolved the problem, Kobuk and I were too beaten down to
take much pleasure in our imminent departure. Usually, the mere
prospect of getting out onto the water is enough to quicken the pulse,
but in this case the extended delay had trained us to expect more of
the same. Reality is a curative for expectations, however, and
when at last we were able to pull out of port it only took a few
minutes of fresh air in the face to restore the proper attitude.
Kobuk has undergone a couple
alterations since she last cruised in open water. The Remote
Troll has been replaced with a new steering system that should guide
the outboard a little more effectively in these oceanic
conditions. Steering is still done using an electrical cable with
a toggle switch on its end, but the engineering of the mechanical
device is more substantial and should cope more effectively in these
oceanic conditions. Also, the old ten horsepower Yamaha outboard
has been replaced with a new one that is rated at twenty. I had
hoped that this would increase our cruising speed by a mile per hour,
but trials suggest that the gain in speed is less than that -- more
like .5 mile per hour. This is a disappointment but at least the
greater power seems to be better able to drive through oncoming waves
with a little more torque and a little less hesitancy.
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Friday, December 4, 2008
Goodbye
Stock Island. So long King's
Pointe Marina.
Adios
Key
West.
We're
headed
out
the channel, shallow reefs to
either side but with a great swath of aquamarine straight ahead. Kobuk
is bobbing and
plunging in the train of little waves that are coming directly at
us. It is not long before we reach the outermost channel
buoy--the lighted one that signals safe water--and then we turn
left. It is the beginning of our run back up the keys to the east
coast of Florida's
mainland.
It
is
1:15
in
the
afternoon.
Once the corner is turned, I no longer have to hold on to avoid being
bucked out of the seat, but Kobuk's strong point has never been
her behavior in beam seas so the motion is only mildly less intense
than it was a few minutes ago. But the water is warm, the sky is
bright, and we are free at last from the wearisome constraints of
dockside life. I'm happy to be here and I think Kobuk is
too. Daily life in harbor had gotten to be a mind-numbing slog
through forgettable days, trying to put right all the little things
that go bad for a boat when she is left unattended for too long.
Out here is where the Keys actually merit their reputation as a
desirable place to live. The islands themselves, the
discontinuous string of skinny little islets, are not, to my way of
thinking, a particularly captivating scene. Many people choose
them because of the balmy winter temperatures and the lovely sunsets,
and if that is what you are after you really have come to the right
place. But for the ordinary person this means you're going to
have to live in a trailer park, separated from your neighbor by little
more than the width of Kobuk's beam. Either that, or its an
overpriced apartment in a concrete cube or a faux-hobo's existence
camped out on a derelict hull anchored offshore--with dinghy duty
obligatory if your going to grocery shop or bar hop. Granted,
this last option has its merits, but at least from my point of view it
only attracts if the vessel is in good enough condition to seriously
consider an eventual escape.
But here in Hawk Channel, the Keys are altogether
different. With the water so clear and the bottom so near, it is
a boaters delight to view the ocean as a three-dimensional thing.
Fishes, there are many. Marine life here abounds perhaps more so
than along any other stretch of developed coast that Kobuk and
I have passed. Even in the less than pristine waters of King's
Pointe Marina, you can watch the manatees come an go (and even bring
them to you with a garden hose, for they like to drink fresh water), or
stare at schools of minnows that dart away in disarray whenever
something larger makes a strike at them. Jet drive issues and
other mechanical matters often have obliged me to take a swim in marina
waters, but only here in the keys have I been able to do it without
feeling squeamish.
As we motor along, the keys lie off the port beam, a mile or two
away. From this vantage, they appear more pristine and less
developed than they actually are. Mangroves line thei shores and whitewashed homes only breast
the waterfront in occasional clusters. No key is very large--at
least, down here in the lower
ones--and when after a couple miles it peters out, a bridge runs
across the short stretch of open water to the next one. It is a thin
band of green, with splashes of white, and an occasional structure of
bronzed concrete--all of it elongated like pulled taffy, with blue sky
above and aquamarine below.
We are headed for Cudjoe, not so far along
since our departure was so late in the day. In the last hour
before reaching the entry channel, the steering for the outboard stops
working. It is the last straw, and for the first time since my
arrival in the Keys six weeks ago I feel a surge of anger course
through me at the injustice of it all. "Stow it, Spike.
You're doing what you want to do, unlike almost everybody else in the
world, and you're going to get agitated by such a little thing?"
By the time the Mazda has driven us up the long, buoyed route thzrough the shallow waters of Cudjoe Bay my mood is much improved and I can
begin to appreciate the peaceful, bowered channel leading to Cudjoe Gardens Marina.
Depart King's Pointe Marina, Stock Island: 24*
33.848' N / 81* 43.793' W
Cudjoe Gardens Marina, Cudjoe
Key:
24*
39.480'
N
/
81*
30.331'
W
Distance:
21
miles
Total
Distance:
8,669
miles
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Saturday, December 5, 1009
Temptation comes in many flavors, and for me today it comes
in vanilla--as in vanilla clear skies and vanilla smooth waters and
vanilla soft winds. When I awaken and look out, the sky is
nothing but gay buntings of white posted in a blue field, and the wind
is a baby kitten. What little wind there is is
coming from the west. The conditions right now are ideal for a
thirty mile run off eastward to Boot Key, and once we get there we can
find a protected harbor. But the forecast--it talks of a front
moving in from the west. It is expected to reach us sometime this
afternoon and with it will come thunderstorms and rain. After it
passes, winds will pick up and shift to the north. For voyaging,
now is ideal and after the front will not be so. But when will
the front arrive? For us, the trip to Vaca
Key will take until around two in the afternoon. Would we get
there before the front? If the front arrives before we have made
harbor will it be hard for us to handle? is ,
it says, and it should reach us sometime this afternoon. There is
no suggestion of how strong the winds will be when the front passes and
Until then, whatever light winds are playing will be from the west as
well. Should Kobuk and I go out.
We
are
headed
east,
only
about
thirty miles, and I expect that we could
make it to Marathon before the middle
of the afternoon.
I am considering the matter as I walk up to the harbormaster's office
to pay for my overnight stay. The harbormaster is a snaggle-toothed,
doughface
named
Allen,
an
even
tempered
man with a gentle streak and an
alert look in his eyes. Behind the counter he has a screen showing doppler
radar for the region and even as he i s asking me what I plan to
do with weather moving in, I look morbidly at the great huge blobs of
red and yellow approaching the Keys from the west. The issue is
settled: I will stay here for the day. I pretend that it was an
obvious choice, one that good sense dictates, and Allen is satisfied
that I have made the right choice. What he doesn't know, of
course, is that it was neither the NOAA forecast nor his gently couched
warnings that closed the deal: it was the doppler.
The
old
addage that a picture is worth a
thousand words has some merit in some circumstances--although life is
really made up of processes, and images by their static nature are not
so good at capturing the passage of time. In this instance,
though, yes, the picture was worth a thousand words. It
showed a more or less continuous line of rain running
northeast-southwest for over a hundred miles, and not that far away.
The presumption behind the saying, however, is that the picture
provides a visual record of reality and that our heavy reliance on
vision somehow makes observation more compelling than any mental
concept that is elicited by mere symbols like words. I accept the
part about the importance of the visual sense, but what bemuses me is
the undeniable fact that a picture also is nothing but symbols.
Clouds are not yellow and rain is not red, and in any event there is
little likelihood that we would be seeing either fom
some vantage point high above the earth's surface. The doppler image is hardly a picture in the same
way that a photo of a boat thrashing
around under slashing rain would be. And yet, the abstract
image of clouds and rain shown as a feature over a distance that would
be impossible to actually see probably has had more emotional effect on
me than the "ship in a storm" photo would have done. Doppler
tells me I can't escape it, it's coming my way, it's unavoidable.
The ship in a storm only tells me that even if we do happen to get hit
we would be able to survive--intimidating, but not a deal-killer.
In any event, the day progresses exactly the way NOAA and doppler and Allen predicted. A perfectly
wonderful morning gives way to overcast and then heavy rain in the
early afternoon. But the winds never do get very strong and it
all clears out in only a couple hours, leaving us once again under blue
skies, but now with a breeze out of the north. Kobuk
could have managed out there but I am pleased not to have gone, pleased
to have exercised caution and what in my view is good judgment.
The steering problem with the outboard, incidentally, has
disappeared. When we arrived at the marina last night, an elfin
little man with a goatee identified himself as a mechanic and I
invited
him aboard to take a look at things. He was more interested in
the improbable Mazda than the rather mundane issue of not being able to
steer the outboard, but eventually I corralled him into taking a look
at the issue at hand, and after five minutes of fiddling--during which
time the controls sometimes worked and sometimes did not--we concurred
that the thing was to not steer the engine to either extreme. If
the electric steering pushed the outboard to the extreme left or
extreme right, the controls seemed to stop working for some
unpredictable length of time. I feel as if things on board are
beginning to get back to normal: this business of mysterious and
unpredictable behavior on the part of mechanical systems has been a
hallmark of our entire trip. The only questions have been
"Which piece of equipment is going to act up?" and "When is it going to
quit for good?"
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Sunday, December 6, 2009
It's early morning and the sun is still painting rose and slate on the
bellies of the scattered clouds. We are in the channel heading
out of Cudjoe Bay
toward what in this neck of the woods is considered to be deep water:
15-25 feet. It is still a few miles to the open sea but it is
visible out there, a serious and steadfast blue that contrasts with the
multi-hued mottle that surrounds us here near Cudjoe.
Our
channel
is
deep,
though,
and
the red and green markers give a
connect-the-dots description of its sinuous passage
seaward. I am standing beside
the seat, steering with the Yamaha control and looking out the slot
between the cabin and its open clamshell top. Directly ahead, a
dark
form,backlit
by the sun, suddenly breaks out of the water and shoots straight
up. It rises, hesitates, and drops, like an event that starts to
happen but then changes its mind. The shape of the projectile was
short and broad with flopping delta wings and a long rat's tail. Kobuk
and I have seen our first ray.
Some may think that only humans play and that other animals
don't. One can point out the foolish antics engaged in by all
sorts of baby creatures--bear cubs, puppies, ducklings--but
those
who
view
playfulness
a
particularly
human behavior would dismiss
this as nothing more than an aspect of childhood (never mind that the
same is pretty much true for humans). But if a ray might play
then what creature--no matter how small its brain or prehistoric its
body structure--might not? A ray is not the sort of creature we
would generally view as fun-loving. It is a prejudice, for sure,
but rays look sullen and sinister and it is hard to imagine a
temperament that would not match. But a ray that jumps straight
up from the water and then flops back down--what interpretation are we
to put on such behavior? Nothing I can think of but play explains
it. If it were a shallow trajectory with the outstretched delta
wings extending the flight, well, then we might presume something
predatory or evasive. But to do a maneuver for which the physical
structure is ill adapted, like a hog walking a fence railing, suggests
that the fellow was only fooling around.
This is only the second day on the water but already the worries and
struggles of dockside life are fading from my consciousness. When
out here, the water separates me from human affairs so completely that
even radio news or cities on the shore only touch my surface and cannot
disturb the deeper sense of contentment. Often a mild pain
develops in my jaw and when it becomes sufficient for me to notice I
realize it is nothing more than the side effects of continuous
smiling. It is not as if things don't go wrong on the
water. Far from it. They go wrong all the time. But
there is nothing oppressive about the problems, no wearying sense that
they will persist month after month, year after year. They are
solvable problems--either that or they will not yield and the voyage
will come to an end. Either way, they do not cast a cloud over
the more distant future. Fear? Anxiety?
Frustration? Yes, yes, yes, but these are emotions that have some
life to them, unlike the discouragement associated with trying to pay
off a mortgage or make career advancement.
We are alongside Bahia Honda
now. The old Flagler bridge with the missing span is just aft of
the port beam and the white sand beach of the island's Atlantic side is
near beside us. There is nobody on the beach and the shallow
waters by it are an aquamarine invitation. But we keep on
motoring until the littler keys--Missouri,
Ohio,
and
____--slip
by
as
well.
Now
what's left for the day's voyage
is to run along side the seven mile bridge, cross under it near the
Marathon end, and then cruise a couple miles along the north coast of Vaca Key to find a
marina for the night. When you are in a small boat, the seven
mile bridge is a reassuring sight--but not for any good reason.
If a problem arises there is no sensible way to tie off at the bridge
and if the weather were up it would be better to stay away from it
anyway. It just looks substantial and stationary, and even
pretty, and this alone is enough to provide some sort of odd comfort.
In the end, I take Kobuk back into Banana
Bay Marina,
the
same
place
we
stayed
last
February after coming through the Everglades
and crossing to the Keys. There
are no good anchorages nearby. The whole of Vaca
Key is given over to Marathon, more or less the "second city" of the
Keys, and outside of _____
Bay the
coastline is a fairly continuous run of development. After tieing off Kobuk and cleaning house, I
cycle off to Hurricane, the same restaurant and bar where I was eating
last February when a furious microburst came through with 60-70 mph
winds and truckloads of rain--the event that worked Kobuk's aft
line free, chewed up her starboard bow chine, and weighed her down with
hundreds of pounds of rainwater--all in less than twenty minutes.
This time the weather holds and I spend a couple hours watching the New York Giants do good things to the Dallas Cowboys.
Banana Bay Marina, Vaca
Key: 24* 43.007' N / 81* 05.049' W
Distance:
35
miles
Total
Distance:
8,704
miles
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Monday, December 7, 2009
Now we're on the Gulf
of Florida side of the Keys
where offshore really is nothing more than a broad
shallows extending only tens of miles before fetching up against
the Florida
mainland coast. Each mile we travel up the chain of Keys will
diminish the breadth of Florida
Bay and
interrupt it with more and more low-lying, mangrove-fringed
islets. It is, in short, an environment more suited to Kobuk's
river-loving character. The channel of the ICW runs along this
side, and that means a steady parade of cans and nuns to keep us on the
straight and narrow. The waters here are deceptive since broad
areas many miles across will maintain a constant depth of around 6-8
feet, making the designation of the ICW's
path seem a bit silly. But then a long, thin ridge that is
serpentine in character will snake across our intended direction of
travel. The ridge will not be visible since it remains below
water level, but often its spine will rise to within a foot of the
surface of the bay--a true hazard for any boater who doesn't pay
attention to the buoys. We have very fine conditions for our
voyage--smiling skies and a light, following breeze. As we put Vaca Key and Grassy Key behind us and come
abreast of Duck Key, we can see the Long Key Viaduct off the starboard
bow and this opening to the Atlantic side somehow gives the breeze a
little lift and puts a bit more punch in the chop--even though all this
is coming from behind us. There is more of a feeling of being out
to sea, and as if to make it more real I notice a dorsal fin coming at
us about 40 degrees off the starboard bow. It submerges and then
comes up again alongside Kobuk, a dolphin porpoising
at our speed. Obviously, it is play, but that is accepted by many
since dolphins are acknowledged to be "smart." But the game does
not last long--only a few surfacings--and
then our companion disappears. Some might view this as
symptomatic of ADD, but who can blame the poor creature when Kobuk and
I are so slow?
Long Key is the next in the chain. Its shape is an invitation to
spend the night since the northeastern half is shaped like a crab's
claw with the commodious Long Key Bight between its pincers. For
those of us who are enchanted by maps, that looks like a romantic place
to drop anchor. But stopping there would make for a short day and
I decide to carry on up as far as Lignumvitae
Key, a gumdrop island that is preserved from development as a state
park. There are good anchorages on both sides of Lignumvitae Key, and the name alone seems worth
stopping for. The decision is made to carry on for a few more
miles and as if to reward us for our decision a flying fish loops out
of the water beside us and zings across in front of Kobuk's bow
at what for such a small and delicate creature would have to be
considered breakneck speed. When this near-transparent projectile
returns to water it bounces back up as if made of rubber and shoots off
into the distance skipping and slowing like a flung, flat stone
stuttering across smooth water.
Now we are far enough into Florida
Bay that signs begin to
appear off the port bow indicating that to go in that direction will
put one in Everglades
National Park
where boats are not  permitted to go aground. If you do so,
the
injury done to your boat is likely to be compounded by the insult of
having to pay a fine to the National Park Service. From this
point on, Florida
Bay is
shallower than your average swimming pool--a pool that is hundreds of
square miles in territorial extent and far more filled with marine life
than even the most elaborate aquarium. This seaward extension of
the Everglades is the
a part of the park that most Americans do not know exists.
It is, perhaps, the more inviting part for its expansive waters shimmer
in the tropical sunlight and the littering of islets has a mystical
look of unapproachable stillness.
We arrive at Lignumvitae Key less than an
hour before sunset, and the imposing wall of vegetation that cloaks its
roughly circular shape does not exactly invite exploration. To
the southeast, there is a channel running towards the bridge that
connects Upper and Lower Matecumbe
Keys. I take Kobuk up the channel to the end of Lower Matecombe
where there is a marina that may have gas. Robbie's Marina lies
tucked up next to the Bay side of the bridge,
and it looks like a movie set for some sort of television sitcom.
There is a collection of off-kilter wooden docks that extend out into
the small embayment at odd angles and on shore you can see a string of
clapboard shacks that house not just an open-air dockmaster's
office but also open-air concessions for a restaurant, for curio shops,
for scuba and fishing outfitters. Everything is set at obtuse
angles and the shacks themselves have palm frond roofs. The lack
of order is a delight, actually, and so is the lack of concrete.
When I tie Kobuk to the outer end of one dock and look down into
the water, it is swarming with an alarming population of oversized
fish--tarpon that run 2-4 feet in length. They are closely packed
and swirl around like minnows in a school. But they are so big
that it all looks mutant. It turns out that at Robbie's people
can feed the fish (and the birds) and this maintains a prodigious
population.
After poking around at the marina for a half hour or so, I push off and
head under the bridge over to the Atlantic side. The sun has
dropped now and the blue-gray light is gradually darkening. Only
about a mile offshore is Indian Key, another state park island.
There are mooring balls off its southwest side and in the fading light
I pick up a mooring and attach Kobuk to it. Nobody is out
here and the darkening sky only reveals a few lights along the shores
of the Matecumbes. It is an
unusually cloud-free night and as I sit in the aft of Kobuk I
can look beyond the Bimini to where the
stars glitter by the hundreds.
Indian Key Anchorage:
24*
52.564'
N
/
80*
40.849'
W
Distance:
32
miles
Total
Distance:
8,736
miles
|
|
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Since Indian Key is a state park with
nobody living on it, there is every good
reason to make a short visit before setting off towards Key Largo. The island is roughly
circular and probably no more than a quarter mile in diameter, and here
on the southwest side a dock has been constructed for day
visitors. The dock is massive, actually--not in terms of length  but rather in the sense of being overbuilt. The
support pilings look sturdy enough to tie a cruise ship to and the
surface of the dock is higher than Kobuk's bimini.
All
this
bulk
and
yet
the
run of the dock would hardly accommodate the
length of a traditional schooner (which, given the shallow water
hereabouts, probably would goaground
before ever reaching the dock anyway).
Although now overgrown with indigenous vegetation and exotic trees
imported by early residents, Indian Key contains the foundational ruins
of an early 19th century settlement that had a gridded street layout on
the northern half of the island--the side facing the run of the
Keys. Indian Key is a sort of outlier, a displaced little patch
of land about a mile away from the discontinuous string of the Middle
Keys. When you look across the water you see not just Matecumbe and Islamorada but also the bridge
that connects them. It all is close enough that you can see the
traffic streaming across the bridge and hear the hum of all its
wheels. It is an odd sensation because on Indian Key itself there is real silence; watching the goings
on across the water is like watching some improbable event that could
in no way occur in your own location. It's a little like
watching a movie that is set in, say, the Australian Outback, while you
are seated in a darkened theatre where the character of the Outback is
utterly lacking.
The stillness of this place--this Indian Key--is appropriate to its
history. That early settlement, you see, was wiped out by a band
of enraged Seminoles who were reacting to the news that there were
plans afoot to displace them westward. Some of the settlers
escaped and some were killed, but in any event the little village was
put permanently out of business.
The plan for today is to run up as far as Key
Largo. It is not far away--only about thirty
miles--and it should be possible to do the first third of the voyage
along this Atlantic side of the Keys before cutting through to the Gulf
side at Snake Creek. The wind and waves are adverse, but now in
the morning there is little force to them and by afternoon we should be
safely sheltered on the Gulf side with Key Largo
as our protector.
In less than two hours of chunking through the slop, we approach the
Snake Creek channel and I fire the Mazda to negotiate its convoluted
path. There is supposed to be a marina just past the bridge over
the channel, but my cruising guide does not clarify on which side of
the channel it will be found. As we slip under the bridge,
Smuggler's Cove Marina
and Restaurant appear on both sides--the marina to starboard and the
restaurant to port. But we're after fuel and there's a big sign
for fuel on the restaurant side, so we head for it. As we curl
around a protective breakwater, the Mazda quits and I have to scamper
around Kobuk's perimeter fending off of boats and pilings until at last
I am able to pull us into an empty slip on a weatherbeaten
dock. The entire place has a tawdry look to it, but there is a
restaurant, it is open, and the woman tending bar gives me help and
sustenance--coffee to start with, but beer before we're done.
That the Mazda has broken down is of course distressing, but on this
occasion I correctly troubleshoot the problem as being a defective
relay. I havertoo little confidence
to accept my own diagnosis without confirmation by a certified
mechanic, though, so I end up paying $50 for one to issue a concurring
second opinion. A relay--that's a simple device. It will
only cost a few dollars. The nearest auto supply stores are up in
Key Largo, about twent miles away, but before cycling all that
distance I decide to call them to see if they have the part. None
of them do, so before the day is over I have had to contact John Lauter in New York, get the name of a company in
Minnesota that can provide me with what I need, and then call that
company to order some relays. The shipment will come overnight
and I should have it by tomorrow morning sometime. It is just one
more day of waiting. Not much--just one more day.
Smuggler's Cove, Islamorada: 24* 57.142'
N / 80* 35.324' W
Distance:
10
miles
Total
Distance:
8,746
miles
|
|
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Time in the Florida Keys runs at a
slower pace than elsewhere so the guaranteed 10:00 AM delivery of the
relays happens a bit later than that. And then when I unpackage them they turn out to be different
from the one that needs to be replaced: they each have one less post
than does the old one. This puts me into an agitated state, of
course, and I initiate a stream of phone calls but I can do nothing
more than leave messages on voice mails. While waiting for
someone to call me back, I take the time to examine the situation a bit
more carefully, and--wouldn't you know it--there appears to be an
unused post on the old relay. When I insert the new relay it fits
fine and the engine fires up immediately. We're in business, so
we motor over to the other side of the Snake Creek Channel to get some
gas before heading off to Key Largo.
The Snake Creek Channel is a natural passageway that happens to cut
right through Islamorada where it is at its thickest. Off the
starboard beam passes the Village
of Islands, a
series of parallel, dead-end canals that are lined with houses and
boats. The canals are separated from each other by engineered
peninsulas of land that are exactly wide enough to accommodate a home
lot, a residential street, and another home lot. This Village of Islands is actually more like a
comb with each tooth being a sliver of such land. The homes
glisten in the sun and their private boat docks are rarely empty.
The landscaping looks like the work of hired help. This opulence
contrasts sharply with the general appearance of the Keys as seen from
Highway 1. The highway (which I did happen to traverse via
Greyhound last February) is about 100 miles of unremitting strip
development that may on occasion look upbeat and lavish but that
usually has the sort of unruly disorder that we so often find along a
major arterial leading out of a large American city. Only when
you get away from the highway do you begin to find the sort of tropical
suburban paradise that attracts Americans sick of winter. Putting
the highway out of sight is not so hard, given the lavish greenery of
the Keys, but escaping from the hum and vibration of passing motorists
is another matter. Most of the Middle Keys are long, skinny
affairs that often are not more than a half-mile wide. I could
faintly hear the passing traffic even when anchored close by Indian
Key--some distance offshore--so I imagine that the residents of the Village of Islands can hear it too.
For me, complete silence would be more desirable, but I suppose that
for many who are more modern than me the distant sound of traffic is
somehow reassuring.
Once Kobuk and I have passed into Florida Bay,
there
is
a
gentle
following
breeze
and an islet-littered slab of
aquamarine water. The islands float
on the surface of the bay like hydroponic bouquets of greenery, each
one like every other and none any higher than a monkeypod
tree. The islands are small but everywhere in this large bay, so
numerous as to blot out any residual sign of the oceanic horizon to the
north. With each mile that we move deeper into the bay, the
islands become more and more clustered and connected until their
individual isolation begins to coalesce into long, skinny strings of
lowland threading across the waters of the bay. Surely there
would be days when the wind would get up and make a choppy mess of
these bay waters, but today the wind is down and the littering of
undeveloped islands scattered about creates an illusion of implacable
calm. Off to starboard the inhabited Keys run like a string with
homes and other signs of humanity hacked out of the greenery, but out
here in the bay the untouched islands are natural clones of each other,
varying in size but in every instance completely cloaked in shrubs and
trees that roll right down to the water as if it is socially
inappropriate to show one's shoreline.
It is not long before the open expanses of Florida Bay
are ovewhelmed by the proliferating
islands that break it into smaller chunks and bits. We we begin to thread our way through a set of
smaller bays that are each surrounded by land and connected to one
other with natural channels: Buttonwood Sound, Grouper Creek, _____
Sound, Dusenbury Creek, Blackwater Sound. And now here in Blackwater Sound--an oversized pond, really--the
urban heart of Key Largo lies to
starboard. I take Kobuk in close to look for some place
where we might spend the night and eventually end up tied to a dock
that belongs to The Big Chill, a restaurant/bar/hotel owned by Jimmy
Johnson--the eternally-smiling, fair-haired football coach who
you see on television if you ever watch Fox NFL Sunday.
The Big Chill appears to be the class act in this neighborhood, even
though there is a fair amount of competition. I end up here
because the place has wifi in its bar so I
can drink and work at the same time. It is quite a nice facility,
actually--mildly grandiose with high ceilings, elaborate decor, and
tasteful outdoor landscaping. It looks as if a lot of locals
frequent the place and not just visitors checked into the upstairs
rooms. Nightlife is definitely more than half of all life
everywhere here in the Keys, so it is not too surprising that when the
sun goes down the place just gets busier and busier. There is a
steady stream of good looking women passing through. This is
something that has always puzzled me. It seems as if all
attractive women are bound and determined to compete with each other
directly. If they are out on their own or with girlfriends, they
seem to all head for the same place--the place that in Key Largo is called The Big Chill. Surely,
the women realize that The Big Chill is going to be crawling with other
women who are drop dead gorgeous, but still they choose to come.
Wouldn't you think some of them would consider going
elsewhere--somewhere where their own beauty is less likely to be overshadowed. But then, I suppose all the
men of means are headed to The Big Chill too.
After finishing my work and having dinner, the crowd has warmed up and
the place as abuzz with laughter and loud talk.
I
cannot
leave
Kobuk tied to the dock overnight, so when the
evening gets more advanced I eventually walk across the lawn and out
the dock to untie her. We slip out onto Blackwater
Sound, a few hundred yards offshore, and drop the hook. The bay
is calm and the air is mild. I go to bed with the gentle sound of
wavelets smacking Kobuk's hull and the cheerful distant clink and
chatter The Big Chill nightlife drifting across the water.
Big Chill Anchorage, Key Largo: 25* 08.809'
N / 80* 23.909' W
Distance:
21
miles
Total
Distance:
8,766
miles
|
|
Thursday,
December 10, 2009
Now at last I feel as if the voyage is becoming real--something that
does not happen at first. In the early days of voyaging there is
excitement to be on the water again and anticipation about what may lie
ahead, but only after there is an established routine does the
undertaking begin to have any sort of spiritual significance. The
business of being "in the zone," of getting up and away each day and
then running down the miles to reach a designated spot becomes a sort
of ritual that provides me with the sort of comforting reassurance that
others might derive from regularly attending communion or knitting
another comforter. Enough days have now passed that when I get
going this morning--eating breakfast, stowing loose gear, pulling
anchor--I have that satisfying sense that I am doing what I am supposed
to be doing.
I didn't expect to have this feeling since this little cruise is
limited to such a few days. Ordinarily, Kobuk and I would
be jaunting along for weeks at a time without a break--usually at least
a month or two--but this time the mechanical problems in Key West
chewed up over five of the seven weeks that were available and so
now we are limited to a mere ten days on the water. Never before have we set off when I have had a deadline date
by which to be in a particular place with Kobuk stored away and
me ready to catch a flight back to Utah. This time, though, I had
already bought my airline ticket back home before we ever left Key West.
This sort of fixed schedule has never before been a part of the plan,
but this time around it was unavoidable. Kobuk and I need
to be in the Fort Lauderdale area by this weekend, and that has been a
given ever since we departed. There is still the nagging concern
with whether another mechanical breakdown might not complicate things,
but the more problematic matter, the lurking worry, always is whether
the weather will cooperate. If bad weather sets in during the
last days of a voyage--when the ultimate arrival point is still some
distance away--the schedule has the potential to force a bad decision,
a choice for us to run in wind and waves when we ought not. But
now that risk is largely behind us. From here on we will have
much more protection on the ICW. Bad weather could still oblige
us to bang around uncomfortably but
nowhere will we have so much open water that to do so would be
foolish. There is still Biscayne Bay,
of
course--thirty
miles
of
broad,
shallow
waters--but today is mild and
unthreatening and by this afternoon we should easily reach Boca Chita
which is more than half the distance to the bay's north end.
It is a hot day today, a summer day in the middle of December.
Well, maybe not quite that hot but hot enough to take me down.
The Keys in late fall and early winter seem to have just two kinds of
days. Winter days when the mild temperatures dip low enough to
start thinking about a sweater, days when the wind probably coming at
you from the north; and then summer days when a light wind coming from
the south is not strong enough to evaporate the sweat from your
skin. This is of the latter type. We cruise along through
Barnes Sound and Card Sound and then across the shallow but submerged
sandbar that separates forms an invisible border between Card Sound and
Biscayne Bay. Florida Bay
is behind us now and the southern tip of the Florida peninsula is off our port
beam. Biscayne Bay is a stretch of broadwater
sandwiched between the mainland and a string of barrier islands, on of
which is where we're headed: Boca Chita.
Boca Chita is just a bead on the string, a postage stamp that would be
measured in acres rather than square miles, and it is separated from
its neighbors to the north and the south by narrow channels that a good
arm could pitch a stone across. Boca Chita used to be a privately
owned retreat on which the wealthy owner not only built and landscaped
his getaway home but also constructed a small lighthouse standing
little more than twice the height of the nearby palms. The
lighthouse, furthermore, marks the entrance into a yacht basin that I would imagine was also the magnate's
creation. The rich guy, though, he gave up on this private little
paradise when his wife had a bad accident there. Now the land is
part of Biscayne Bay
National Park
and the park service does a good job of maintaining it--even though
there is no park ranger residing there. The fees collected for
using the park and for tieing off in the
basin are collected on the honor system--which I dishonored. I
did not have to pay the park usage fee since I have the senior pass
that gets me into any of the national parks free, but I was supposed to
put ten dollars in an envelope to pay for Kobuk's overnight
stay. I only had eight dollars and a couple twenty dollar bills
so I opted to underpay. They have my name and address but I don't
suppose they'll come after me for two dollars.
From Boca Chita one can look northward across Biscayne Bay and see the
tall buildings of downtown Miami
clustered in the distance. The land and islands surrounding
the entire southern half of Biscayne Bay are a National Park, so the
sight of Miami on the far horizon contrasts with the coastal wilderness
to be seen most everywhere else. I took all this in while walking
around Boca Chita. The island can easily be circumambulated in
15-20 minutes, but I cut the outing short out of due respect for the
mosquitoes who appeared to resent my presence. Back at Kobuk,
I lathered up with bug juice and then spent a few hours doing office
work at a picnic table nearby. When night arrived and it was time
to sleep, the zipped curtains kept the mosquitoes at bay but made the
still, hot air even more stifling. Sometime soon I am going to
have to work out a solution to the problem of dead air up in the bunk
area under the bow. In cool climates it is a pleasure because it
traps body heat, but now we're in the tropics and I must reluctantly
consider putting a hole in the forward deck. I have taken a
stopgap measure--installation of a small fan forward--but whenever I
use it I worry about running the battery down if it is left on all
night. Maybe someday I should actually let it run all
night just to find out whether the problem is real or imaginary.
Boca Chita
Key Harbor: 25* 31.441'
N / 80* 10.491' W
Distance:
32
miles
Total
Distance:
8,798
miles
|
|
Friday, December 11, 2009
Between Boca Chita and Miami, Biscayne
Bay is only partially protected from the Atlantic.
A
string
of
shoals
runs
between
Boca Chita and Key Biscayne, and that
takes the punch out of any heavy weather coming in from seaward, but
neither reefs nor islands break the surface of the sea, so rough chop
must be a common feature in this upper part of the Bay. When I
awake in the morning, the wind is out of the northeast--the direction
most likely to make our passage uncomfortable--but the waters of the
Bay look manageable. We set out  right
away on the theory that if
conditions change they will only get worse. This is one of the
few times when a view of conditions from land turns out to be accurate;
things are no worse than they looked from shore and after a reasonably
stress-free couple hours we close in on Miami.
With the waterfront skyscrapers looming ahead, a sailboat comes off the
port shore like a rocket. There are other sailboats cruising
about over there, but this particular one blows by them all like a
greyhound on steroids. As it angles towards us and gets a little
closer, I can see that it is actually a small monohull
sloop with a hydrofoil. Its entire hull is out of the water and its forward motion is not just fast but completely
untouched by the waves and chop. It is running at a speed
that would be pretty much comparable with Kobuk when the Mazda
is at full throttle. This is quite impressive and it gets me to
thinking about constructing a hydrofoil. A major problem with
them is of course the vulnerable wing structure down below water
level--an assembly that is hard to attach to the hull and that would
not take kindly to any sort of grounding. But what if the
hydrofoil were attached to the two hulls of a catamaran? I should
think that the attachment could be much stronger since it could be
anchored on both hulls. This sub-surface wing assembly still
would be susceptible to easy damage, but to a far lesser d egree.
Plus,
I
should
think
it
would
not have to project down so far into the
water. . . . And on and on my mind mulls over the question.
In fact, I know virtually nothing about hydrofoils (except that
Alexander Graham Bell developed a
successful prototype up in Cape
Breton) but that does not stop me from coming up with all sorts of
grand schemes for how to build one. Some would say I have too
much time on my hands, I suppose, but this speculative business is
really quite fun.
Eventually, we cross under the _____
Bridge and the skyline
of Miami
looms above us. It is not a sunny day: the sky is littered
with gauze and a light haze has chased away any hint of shadows.
Colors of everything are diluted and diminished by the whiteness of the
atmosphere, but even so it is evident that downtown Miami has lots of
new highrises painted in a pleasing
variety of pastel colors. This is not what the place looked like
when I last visited--about thirty years ago. Of course, to
approach a city by land is a totally different experience from doing so
by sea. Almost always, the sea approach is more dramatic
and abrupt: there stands the city--you can see the skyline in the
distance and it only changes by getting enlarged as you close in, but
then suddenly you are right downtown, right at the heart of the whole
enterprise. You never have to push on through exurbs and suburbs
as you would have to do if you were approaching by road. First
the city it is a distant profile near the horizon and then suddenly you
are so close that you can hear the traffic and the other street
sounds. Well, here we are in downtown Miami. Maybe not actually
downtown, but so close to downtown that we can observe it. It is
nice, I guess, but for me there is always something disturbing about a
place where the buildings are taller than anything for hundreds of
miles.
Kobuk is now working her way up the ICW. The big
bays are behind us and now the channel is closing in. For a few
miles past the Miami CBD, it remains a buoyed channel in a rather broad
expanse of water, but land pinches in inexorably from both sides as we
motor along and before we have left the built up area of the city
behind we are in that old familiar water corridor--a chann el of a few hundred
yards breadth with bridges leaping over it like lemmings jumping into
the sea. Now we can forget about mangroves and aquamarine
waters and alligators. We're in upscale, urban Florida.
We are on the nautical equivalent of an arterial route out of a
city. On both sides, highrises and
homes are organized on the landscape in an orderly way that
affords as many of them as possible some sort of access to this
waterway. Dead end canals branch off, one after another, mile
after mile, giving the region an unholy amount of waterfront
property--engineered into waterfront but waterfront nonetheless.
As always, the waterfront land is desirable land so you don't see much
poverty or grit hereabouts. It has all been prettified.
Prettiest of all is the development on and surrounding Williams Island,
a planned community sandwiched between the ICW and Maule Lake.
I
have
found
the
phone
number
for a marina there and when I call the
woman who answers lets me know that, yes, they do have room for a
transient boat and that she will make sure there is someone out
near the ICW to flag me down and show me the way into the marina.
When I arrive, she makes the apprearance
herself. She waves to me and directs me off to port along a
channel to Maule Lake, and then to starboard along the back side of the
island, and then after passing five 100+' yachts in a row to starboard
once again into the narrow marina channel, and then to port as Kobuk
approaches an engineered island in the middle of an island, with docks
surrounding it on all sides. Deep within the marina there is a
floating dock, and Maria has me tie up there.
Williams Island Marina, Maule Lake:
25* 56.599' N / 80* 08.252 W
Distance:
33
miles
Total
Distance:
8,831
miles
|
|
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Kobuk and I recline in a protective cocoon. We are on an island that has land no more than
a few hundreds of yards away on any side. Actually
Williams
Island
appears to be just a peninsula but the connecting neck is a gated,
guarded single-entrance access designed to give the illusion of an
island. The island has nothing on it
that was not expressly designed to be here. There
are
about
eight
25-story
apartment
buildings
scattered about and then
such infilling facilities as tennis courts, small shops, swimming
pools, club house, and fancy restaurant. There
is
of
course
this
marina
and
its configuration is a testimonial to how
thoroughly everything here has been engineered and designed into
existence. The narrow-neck entrance to the
marina leads to a lollipop of water with an island taking up most of
its middle. And then that island has a
flyover pedestrian bridge connecting to Williams Island proper. This is not a divine design or the work of
Mother Nature. It is an entrepreneurial
vision of what people want. It
is
altogether
impossible
to
visualize
what
must have existed on this
site in pre-Columbian times. Maybe it was
swamp. Maybe it was mainland.
Maybe it was the bottom of the lagoon.
Who knows.
Now, though, now it is an expression of nothing but human
notions of how people with money would like to live.
It is quiet here. The
landscaping is lovely and the architecture tasteful.
Even the apartment buildings are tolerably pleasing to the
eye. Of course the place is dead. There is no nightlife and the only cultural
diversity that can be seen is provided by the employees who keep the
grounds, man the drawbridge, wait on the tables, work in the marina,
and generally keep the whole operation ticking. But
deadness
is
okay,
I
guess,
when
a one-mile drive from here takes you to
Route 1 where shopping malls, restaurants, bars, and fitness centers
line the way.
My tone must
convey a certain sense of disapproval, but one should not take it too
seriously since I have decided to spend a second night here. Tomorrow will be the last day of voyaging for
a while since on Monday morning I must catch a flight back to Utah. I have an arrangement for Kobuk:
she
will
be
stabled
at
Hideaway
Marina
in Pompano Beach. That is only about twenty miles from here,
just the other side of Fort
Lauderdale. We
could just as easily run up to there today, but it is sufficiently
peaceful and secure here that I have decided to stay put.
In other words, Williams Island
may be nothing but a piece of engineered landscape but it is appealing
enough to keep me around. On the other
hand, a long-term stay would quickly become a bore.
One of the
main attractions of Williams Island Marina is the shower.
It is the first one I have used since I left Utah on October
25th. When you’ve been on the
road for a while, nothing feels quite so
good as standing under a pressurized stream of hot water.
I took a shower last night, but then today I went back to
do it again. By the standards of the last
few weeks, I really didn’t need another shower, but taking a long, very
hot shower is one of the ways I go about getting my money’s worth
whenever I stay in a place like this.
In the
afternoon, as I am returning to Kobuk, I pass by a
short, stocky man who is washing his boat. He
turns
out
to
be
a
securities
trader named Josh who has escaped from his
New York City origins by doing all his trading online.
He moved down here a few years ago and now has an
apartment in one of the nearby buildings. There
he
does
his
trading
online,
and
then when he is done for the day he
comes down here to spend time on his boat. He
evidently
is
well-set
financially,
and
cannot
be much over forty. He
comes over to take a look at Kobuk
and generally gives his approval to what we are doing.
It is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be
in Josh’s situation—living in one of these apartments and spending a
chunk of each day puttering around on Kobuk. Somehow, the prospect has little
appeal—although I certainly can visualize many life situations that
would be much less satisfactory.
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Sunday, December 13, 2009
All the problems that cropped up trying to get Kobuk
out of Key West
have shaken my confidence in the reliability of the mechanical systems
on board. So now, as we set off for Pompano Beach
there is this nagging concern that maybe something will fail. My flight is tomorrow morning and my storage
arrangement must be consummated before five this afternoon. This really should be a simple matter, but
what if something causes us to go dead in the water?
Nothing does, though. All
systems operate fine and we progress according to schedule.
The only
thing of any consequence that happens between Williams
Island and Pompano Beach is that we pass by Fort Lauderdale. This is not a city that one thinks of as being
particularly large or metropolitan, but there is no denying the
grandiosity of its port facilities. In
this respect, it is not as stunning as, say, Norfolk, but even so its
accommodations for large ships are much more extensive and elaborate
than one would expect for such a small city. Of
course,
the
ships
are
not
naval. They are
for the most part cruise ships that run out of here to various Caribbean destinations.
Also, the
small boat traffic on the water is much greater than it was in Miami. When passing by Miami I don’t think there were
more than a handful of instances when I actually had to pay attention
to what other boats were doing since so few were ever in our vicinity,
but here in the ICW as it passes through Fort Lauderdale the
navigational task of avoiding other boats is a more or less continuous
process of anticipation, calculation, and avoidance.
Last February I spent a day in Fort
Lauderdale, a layover between a bus trip from Key West and a flight to Utah. The
downtown
was
broad,
clean
streets
with
surprisingly little going on—and
I was left with the impression that the city has little life. But now on the ICW, my attitude is changing.
Hideaway
Marine in Pompano Beach
is an aptly named storage facility tucked off in a backwater canal that
you would never discover without directions. I
was
put
onto
it
by
Truck,
a worker down at Kings Pointe Marina
where Kobuk
and I were stalled for so long. Truck is a
slightly pudgy dynamo who
cannot stay still and seems to do more work that all the other Kings
Pointe employees together. This may be
misleading since his level of activity seems to be driven more by his
innate restlessness than any keen desire to get specific things done. Nonetheless, he always appeared to be rushing
around when most everybody else was sitting in the shade of the marina
store’s porch. In any event, Truck
suggested I contact Hideaway since he used to work there and he thought
it would have reasonable storage rates for Kobuk. I
did
call
and
he
was
right:
it is less expensive than any of the dozen
or so other places that I called. Hideaway
is
purely
a
storage
and
repair
facility—it doesn’t have slips for
transients or long term stays. Kobuk
and I arrive there early in the afternoon, and then the afternoon is consumed with laundry chores and boat cleaning. Around 4:00 PM, we maneuver over to be pulled
from the water and before closing time I am on my way to the nearest
bus stop, backpack on my shoulder, headed for Fort Lauderdale and then
its airport.
Hideaway Marine, Pompano Beach:
26*
13.583'W
/
80*
06.226'
W
Distance:
23
miles
Total
Distance:
8,854
miles
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