Miami and on to the Florida West Coast

May 30, 2014

We have been on a mooring at Coconut Grove Sailing Club for the last week.  It is a very pleasant place right in Miami (Coconut Grove) and we have enjoyed our 'reentry' into life in the States after over five months in the Bahamas.  A neat picture of Barefoot taken by a mooring neighbor from the top of his mast follows:

We enjoy Miami, but we didn't do much that we have not reported in previous blogs except for a couple of items:

• We enjoyed a great lunch at the Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana.       http://www.versaillesrestaurant.com/.  If you see the movie 'The Chef' (which we really enjoyed) it is the restaurant that they visit after listening to Inez's father perform salsa music at a club. We are big fans of the Columbia Restaurants based in Tampa, so this was a comparison visit.  The Columbia's bread and Mojitos's were, in our opinion, much better.  But we both enjoyed our entrees immensely (Imperial Rice for Tom and Vaca Frita De Pollo for Joyce), so we think it is a tie.  We will return!  While Miami is the center of Cuban-American culture today, many people do not realize that the first major Cuban population in Florida was on the West coast.  The Columbia first opened in 1905, when Miami was still mostly swamp; the Versailles opened in 1971!
• We toured the northern section of Coral Gables - very nice homes!  The Alhambra entrance near Little Havana is very impressive.

Tomorrow (Saturday, May 31) we plan to leave Miami and head to the west coast of Florida.  The weather is a bit unsettled (we expect to get at least a little wet), but it doesn't get better for at least a week and there is a possibility of an early season tropical storm late next week, so it seems best to get moving.  

Tomorrow we plan to head down the Hawk Channel to Rodriguez Key near Key Large where we will anchor for the night.  Then the next day we will continue on the Hawk Channel to Marathon, where we plan to lay over for two nights.  Then we will leave there in the morning on Tuesday June 3rd, to travel up out of the Keys and continue overnight for a 150+ nautical mile trip to Pelican Bay on Cayo Costa where we will 'hunker down' for any bad weather.  

Tom

Moored Coconut Grove Sailing Club

Miami, FL