17 Dec 2011 – 5th straight night on the hook!

Well we’ve made it to Miami at last – North Miami counts too, right?

Our trip down over the last few days became more interesting as the days went past.

We considered heading out of the ICW at West Palm Beach and heading down the coast to Fort Lauderdale (53 miles), but in the end decided to tackle the inside passage with it’s myriad of low bridges, its plethora of boaters and the concrete walls of this part of the ICW. In addition there are a lot of slow speed areas in many of the areas where manatees like to laze.

All in all we had a great trip and are glad we did it. We were lucky too though because even though today is Saturday, the morning started off pretty wet and only really improved by lunchtime. So I guess a lot of local boaters stayed at home. For the most part we were in a group of one other launch and 4, sometimes 5 sailboats heading south.

And we did have one experience of the bouncing effect when a big launch went past north bound and his wake bounced from one side of the channel to the other. It was pretty much like a washing machine!

All the nights at anchor have been very peaceful – but it’s amazing how different an anchorage can sound in the book. Think of Manatee Pocket and look at the chart and I’m envisioning a quiet secluded anchorage in the middle of nowhere. Well how wrong could I be – it was surrounded by houses, marinas and other boats!

Last night we anchored alone in quite a big bay and before long there were three other boats pretty much ‘hugging’ us. In addition to that we realized that on the shoreline there was a restaurant with live music – and a railway line with some noisy trains.

Tonight we’re out of the hustle and bustle and anchored in a large anchorage bordering the university.

Tomorrow we move into a marina again – yay – hopefully some wi-fi – what am I going to do in the Bahamas? My wi-fi booster is just not doing it’s job.

Then more on the dinghy saga -it’s still leaking, so on Monday we plan to hire a pick up truck for a couple of hours and take the dinghy to an inflatable repairer recommended by Mercury. At this stage we are just holding out for a fix as of course it’s now Christmas and there’ll be more delays on getting a replacement at this time.

But that done, we’ll provision up, check out through immigration and wait for our weather window to cross to the Bahamas.

Oh yes, for those who are as ignorant as we were – manatees are quite large aquatic mammals that like to laze around in the shallows. We’ve had a couple of glimpses of movements in the water but we’ve still not really seen them.