Thursday Night

As you know, I'm without my phone, so i can't post while I'm traveling. I have a loaner phone.

We've had a very busy 3 days with some serious sailing. The forecast was good for 3 days of offshore sailing and I wanted very badly to get as far as Palm Beach on the "outside" because the draw bridges on the ICW between Miami and Palm Beach are terrible. There's so many of them and they open on a schedule. It has you waiting for a long time. I did that trip back in 2005 and swore that if I could avoid it, I'd never do it again.

Jan and I left Key West around 8am on tuesday and made it to our target destination on tuesday night - Long Key Bight. We anchored there around 6:30pm. We had dinner on the boat and watched the sunset.

We left Long Key Bight around 7am with Marine Stadium anchorage in Miami as our goal. It was a 73 nautical mile day, but we pulled into the anchorage around 6pm. Doug and I stayed there last week, and we were hassled by the cops and told to leave, but I was able to talk our way into staying overnight. We'd noticed that the folks anchored behind us had stayed hidden in their boat and the cops never even approached them.
I told jan as we were entering the anchorage about it and to be on the lookout for the cops. Before we'd even gotten all the way in the anchorage, a cop passed by on the way to the east end of the anchorage. I told jan to go below and I quickly tossed the anchor overboard, payed out about 50 feet of chain, closed the companionway doors and snapped the cover over them. I then jumped through the hatch into the boat. The idea here was to look like no one was on the boat.
The cop went around for about 30 minutes and told people to leave, but he never even came over to our boat.

We had dinner at the Rusty Pelican with the lights of Miami reflecting on the water.

At 6:30am, I pulled up the anchor and we were headed for a 65 nautical mile trek in the ocean to Lake Worth - just north of Palm Beach. The forecast was for west winds at 10-15, then going NW late in the day. That forecast never came about. IT was NW 15-20 from the beginning and I made as much of it as possible, figuring that it would go north during the afternoon - and it did. We saw speeds of 8.4 knots while it was NW, but we were heeled over 15-30 degrees all day. About 2 hours out from Lake Worth inlet, it turned due north (right on the nose) and we had to put the sails away and motor straight into a 20+ knot wind. It was not fun going from 8+ knots to around 5.

We anchored around 5:30pm and dingied over to the sports bar that I was at about 2 weeks ago.

We plan to be home on Sunday night. I'm not sure if I'll post again before then.

Jan says hey.