Lake Maule to No Name Harbor ...

We are at No Name Harbor on the Bay of Biscayne just below Miami waiting to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bimini in the Bahamas.  We could have gone today, but my reading of the weather is that tomorrow may be a bit faster crossing with the help of some breeze.  Three or four cruisers left today, and Pen sort of wonders shouldn't we have, too, but such is life.  .... No Name Harbor turns out to be a party spot for Miami boaters on the weekends, and it is really crowded with power boats and, last night, very noisy.  But yesterday was the first day to wear shorts and go shirtless since we started our trek.  Finally, some nice weather.  It really buoys our spirits.

On leaving Lake Worth we passed through Fort Lauderdale and the so-called "miracle mile" of obscenely expensive houses (and boats) along the ICW.  This part of the ICW has bascule bridge after bascule bridge.  I think we went through some eighteen or more, and it's tiring.  But we got to Lake Maule in North Miami and spent two nights there.  I charged the batteries with the Honda 2000 generator and something happened to our Freedom 20 charger/inverter.  It charges via the generator but the inverter has stopped working.  If not charging the Freedom 20 just shuts down.  I cannot find the problem.  It's not a fuse and maybe its just a tired old charger/inverter.  Anyhow, it's not stopping us.  Our engine charges the batteries and so does our supplemental generator and our wind generator, so the real problem is that we don't have a heavy-duty inverter to change 12V to 110V power.  But we've worked around that, I think, with a smaller 400W inverter that plugs into the cigarette lighter fixture on the 12V system ... we dinghied into shore at Lake Maule, tied up in the mangroves, and walked over to the West Marine store a couple of blocks away to get it.

The trip down from Lake Maule to No Name Harbor took us through the last three of all those bridges and through Miami itself (quite a sight, indeed).  With the sun shining and a beautiful day it would be hard to imagine anything negative, and ... and then ... a red marker on the waterway yesterday jumped out in front of the Captain while his head was turned and scraped Alizee's wing (the cap rail and metal trim) ... I'm very embarrassed while Penelope sees it as a blessing in disguise that it didn't happen while she was at the helm.  I'll try to do some cleaning up of the wound, but it really can't be fixed until we return from the Bahamas in June.

So, here we are watching the weather.  For the past four days the rainy day appeared to be Tuesday, but now it looks as though tomorrow may have more rain than Tuesday and the winds might be better on Tuesday.  We'll see.  Perhaps we'll stay another day, but I think we both just want to get across the stream.


Geotrack plot

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