Coconut Grove Sailing Club Marina

The best part about this lifestyle is adapting to zero expectations and changing all of your plans when the unexpected happens!

Tuesday morning we had great winds to cross over to Bimini so we woke up early and left Fort Lauderdale. In order to get to Bimini we had to head south before crossing. It was rougher than expected but no big deal as we were excited to leave Fort Lauderdale. About 3 hours into our crossing the boat unexpectedly turned which woke Kendra up from a nap due to her little garden exploding on the floor. I ran up to the helm and started to hand steer because our autopilot stopped holding course. After about an hour of trying to diagnose the problem (still heading towards Bimini) I found all of our hydraulic fluid for the autopilot spewing into the engine compartment. At this point we decided to sail into Key Biscayne to figure out our next step. All this went down after only 4-5 hours of sleep the night before so we both crashed once we set anchor.

Once we woke up and started to put the boat back together, I was able to get ahold of the autopilot manufacturer and luckily they knew what the problem was and are sending us the last repair kit in the United States to get us back on the water! Right now it looks like we will be getting our kit on Saturday and making the crossing on Sunday (if all goes to plan)!

For now we are at an anchorage just outside of Dinner Key in Coconut Grove with about 500 other sailboats which is pretty cool! Of course everything happens for a reason and we were able to go into town to get Kendra a new Yoga matt that I decided to donate to the ocean. A dinghy and a few one wheels make quite the mode of transportation...cant say that we miss old Sally, our 2 door Honda Accord that was our work truck the past 5 months!

Stay tuned for the Bimini crossing!Read more