Key Biscayne

We arrived Sunday at 1pm to the entrance (which was the earliest I suggested, half way between high and low tide). The tides vary by 4feet…. And coming in we had 5feet under the keel in some spots.
Brian always does a great job picking the best spot to anchor. We dropped the hook and had a nap! You could see city lights (Miami) in the background at night.
Whether it is a day or three days… it always takes up time to recover from a night passage and the following day or two we seek lots of sleep.
On Monday we slept in, and then got to work on boat chores. I fixed the blower fan to cool the engine room. Brian was spot priming and varnishing the outside teak. In the afternoon I hand washed our underwear (we haven’t done laundry since Honduras). Pain had been steadily increasing as swollen veins protruded from my seat. I called Urgent Care and suspected it was a thrombosed hemorrhoid. Creams, wipes, and painkillers were of no use.
Tuesday we dropped the dinghy as I hummed and haa-ed at going to the clinic. The coat would be $350USD and I knew it would eventually fade. I busied myself with fixing the fan to cool the dashboard and read a lot. We bought many books in Key West and I’ve been ploughing through them: Dharma Bums, Gathering Moss, The Life Impossible, Marriage at Sea and Hallelujah Anyway (“Love is hard… love is seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.” - Anne Lamott). I also chatted with Andrew, Amy and the kids (Kai and Ella). I try to FaceTime with them once a week.
On Wednesday we finally went to town. We docked at the Bill Briggs National Park with our dinghy and caught a FreeBe to the grocery store. FreeBe is electric cars, using an app the same as Uber, but totally free! We went for Sushi and then to a small park (where we watched small turtles and moorhen birds with their babies - a duck like bird, but no webbed feet, also know as a swamp chicken). Winn Dixie in Key Biscayne was paradise considering the grocery stores we’ve been to the last few months. We stocked up, including a big beef tenderloin, which we regrettably had to return later that day. I opened it to cut it up and the smell was rancid! We were supposed to join some other sailors from Austria for a picnic, but timing did not work, so we met with an old client of Brian’s, who he had helped release from an Uruguay jail.
The next day I was still suffering so we stayed on the boat, read, cleaned, and varnished. My Thursday calls with Ashlynn (and Vinny) are always a highlight of my week. This week she showed me her newest tattoo (Muah Ouah)… I shared it with Andrew, Pete and Dad… it was something mom used to always say 💕
I wanted to take Brian to Wynwood Walls and KYU (a Korean fusion restaurant I had been to several years before with Melanie Lang). My plan was to take a Freebe to the end of Key Biscayne and Uber the rest of the way. Brian had different thoughts…. So we took the bus into downtown Miami and then a trolley (with no A/C) to Wynwood. It took us about 3 hours and by that time someone was grumpy and hungry. After we ate, we went to the walls and walked through, then to grab an ice cream, and a stop for coffee at Panther Cafe (where I met the artist Mark Diamond).
We Uber’s back to Key Biscayne and were having dinner with Arturo (whom we met a few days earlier) and Sebastian (who was also in prison 14 years ago) and their wives. Both families from Argentina. From the penthouse apartment, we were able to see Lorena while we ate a special meal. Sebastian drove us to the national park gates (in his Tesla X bat mobile). The gates were closed so we crawled under the fence and back to the dinghy and Lorena.
We had been watching the weather window and it looked like Sunday or Monday, but on Saturday morning… it looked like that evening would give us the best wind angle, so we decided to leave around 7pm. We went to shore one final time to check out the national park and its beach and lighthouse, before setting off on a 2 day trek to Cumberland Island, Georgia.
We left Saturday at 7pm and arrived at St Mary’s Marina on Monday at 5:45pm. Grateful the dockhand/ manager (Colin), stayed late to help us catch the lines. Coming in the channel we were approached by the coast guard (with a machine gun on its bow), we had the radio turned down so didn’t hear them hailing us on Channel 16. They wanted to know our intentions, and found out they were clearing the channel for a navy vessel. There is a large nuclear submarine dock at Kings Bay (inside the channel).Read more