Start: Lake Sylvia 26.06.230 N, 80:06.350 W

Finish: No Name Harbor, Miami  25.40.55 N, 80.09.701 W

1215 Underway

1737 Anchor down at No Name Harbor

Total Time:  5 hour 22 minutes

Total Distance:  30 nm

This was almost an “or not” day.  Late yesterday afternoon, Mark received a packet of papers by email for his house closing on Friday.  They needed to be signed, notarized, and sent by overnight FedEx back to Minnesota.  Everyone involved up there knew he was on a boat, with no easy access to complete this paperwork. Luckily we were still in a city with banks, so we were up early riding in the dinghy a few miles down the river to a place where we could tie up and walk to a Wells Fargo Bank to get everything done.  While Mark did that, I walked Daisy and about an hour later we were back at the boat in Lake Sylvia.  By the time we got everything ready to go, pulled anchor, and went to the nearby fuel dock at Bahia Mar for diesel ($4.66/gallon), we made the 12:30 17th St. Causeway bridge opening. In the photo above, Anything’s Pawsible follows us under the bridge. 

We were finally on the ocean for the first time with a reliable, fast propulsion system and a new, crisp mainsail.  When we raised and lowered our mainsail today for the first time, we discovered something curious.  It was very stiff and slippery.  Even when “new,” the mainsail that came with our boat was soft and pliable, completely unlike this one.  As we learned recently, our mainsail had major sun damage,  utterly impossible with the limited times we had used it and the careful storage in its sailbag the rest of the time.  Our guess is that somewhere between France and Ft. Lauderdale during the delivery, a switch was made.  Perhaps our sail tore and the only one available was off a charter boat.  We’ll never know. But, seeing and feeling this two year old replacement sail off a Lagoon 440, we KNOW that we never had a new sail on Seas the Day.  More experienced sailors probably would have realized this the first time they saw or felt the mainsail.  Sadly, this was the first sail we had ever owned, so we didn’t know what we got at the time.

The directions for breaking in new diesel engines are to vary the speed, which we did all day.  We were extremely pleased with our progress, varying from 6.5 to over 8 kts even though we were going straight into the wind.  We expect our fuel efficiency will be better when we can motor at a consistent rpm. We have heard that one engine will use 1/2 gallon per hour.  Many 420 owners find using just one engine is sufficient when motorsailing. That is much better than the over 2 gallons per hour we used when running the generator to power and charge the hybrid system while motoring.  The annoying news is that we still have to use that generator from time to time to charge our batteries when the sun isn’t shining on the solar panels.  The good news is, the places we go are usually quite sunny. 

The weather was nice but we were headed directly into the wind so we had waves crashing  over the foredeck. The entire boat was covered in salt after a few hours.  When we arrived at No Name Harbor, an anchorage popular with cruisers heading north, south, or to the Bahamas, was about half filled.  We found a spot near the back of the small area. In the photo at the left it looks like we could swing into the trees, but there is very little movement in here so we knew we were fine. 

We discovered back in Lake Sylvia that we didn’t want to use our usual method for an anchor alarm.  The feature on our chart plotter is quite reliable, but also uses power all night.  Our back-up is our portable Garmin GPS, which appears to be dead.  The next option is an iPhone APP, which I downloaded but haven’t figured out yet.  Therefore, we trusted our Rocna anchor, which has only failed us once in extremely high winds during a squall.  As soon as we get to a West Marine, we should be able to get a replacement for our portable GPS since we have an extended warranty on it.

We took a walk towards town to get Daisy off the boat, but other than that relaxed and waited for the morning and the next leg or our trip south to Rodriguez Key. Oh, there was one small glitch.  After our walk, we went back to where we tied the dinghy and Mark discovered that he left the keys to the lock back on the boat.  Lynn and Shelley were with us, and we didn’t know anyone else in the anchorage to ask for help. If desperate, one could swim the short distance to the boat.  Two other dingies were tied to the side wall, and we knew one belonged to cruisers we saw doing laundry.  Mark rushed over to catch them before they went back to their boat and hitched a ride over to our boat and then to his waiting passengers at the dinghy.  The day started and ended with problems, but everything in between was excellent.