Monday, October 27, 2014

Miami Car Trip

October 27, 2014

We are currently on a short car-trip to Miami.

The primary purpose of the trip was to donate our old sails to http://sailsforsustenance.org/.  This organization collects used sails and provides them to subsistence fishermen in Haiti. For sailors, if you have any excess sails, consider donating them to Sails For Sustenance or a similar organization.  It can make a big difference in the life of a fisherman.  A short video of re-purposed sails in action can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDLYlpcLz9I

Sails for Sustenance Collection Box
Collection box in Miami
Of course any trip to Miami is not all business.  Miami is a vibrant city with a lot of interesting things to do and great food!

We visited the HistoryMiami museum  (http://www.historymiami.org/) in downtown Miami.  We had been to this museum a few years ago, but it has been significantly expanded since they took over the space formally occupied by the Miami Fine Arts Museum, which moved and was renamed the Perez Art Museum Miami.  A word of advice - there is still a lot of confusing or down-right misinformation about the downtown museums on the web since the recent changes.  Their expanded space is largely devoted to folklife exhibits which present local traditional arts and culture.

A highlight of the visit was a concert by an excellent steel pan (drum) band named 21st Century Steel Band (http://www.21stcenturysteelband.com/home.htm).  We have heard steel pan (rhymes with 'mon') bands many times before and this one was very good.  A surprise was a number of classical music numbers that they played.  Apparently in the early days of pan music in Trinidad, there were only two radio stations and significant airplay of classical music, and the bands played what they heard. Michael, the band leader and 'tuner', has been playing pan for around 40 years and once toured with Liberace.



No trip to Miami is complete without food (a bad place for a diet) and this trip was no exception with trips to Pollo Tropical and The Versailles Restaurant.

Also we discovered a relatively new Spanish restaurant in Coconut Grove named La Gamba.  We were walking around the Grove on Saturday night and heard some great music from a trio playing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.  The percussionist used a 'drum box', and a guitarist and female singer completed the trio.  The singer sounded to me like a young Celia Cruz, and they were great.  We did not eat at the restaurant, but plan to on a later visit.

As usual, we enjoyed our visit to Miami very much!

Tom
By Car
Miami, FL

Friday, October 24, 2014

Shake-down Complete

October 23, 2014

Earlier this week we completed our annual shake-down cruise.   The purpose is to reactivate equipment that has not been used over the summer and test EVERYTHING we possibly can.

We left Twin Dolphin marina in Bradenton on Sunday morning and motored down the Manatee River and across Tampa Bay to Egmont Key where we anchored.

Egmont is not the best anchorage, but it has the best water within miles and we like to reactivate and test our water maker there. We never run it in the marina, where the dirty water would clog the filters within minutes.  The process hit a small snag when a control panel would not power up.  A quick debug indicated that some unnamed incompetent marine technician had installed a new RJ12 connector backwards on a 'telephone cable' connecting the control panel to the computer; however, Joyce says I can still work on the boat because I work cheap :-).

Sure enough the east wind built up a little and it started to get bouncy at Egmont.  But that gave us at least a little wind to test out our new sails as we headed back across Tampa Bay.  We purchased a new head-sail and stay-sail from Mack Sails in Stuart FL this summer.  We were very pleased!  The sails looked and set great.  With a little under 10 knots of wind close-hauled with full sail, we were making over 5 knots through the water.  We can't wait to give them some more wind!

We then returned to the Manatee River where we spent 2 nights at anchor at Emerson Point.

Overall, the shake-down was very successful and the boat appears ready for our winter cruise.

In early November we will leave Twin Dolphin Marina and head down the west coast of Florida and eventually to Miami where we will stage for a crossing to the Bahamas.  Our exact itinerary for the season is still a bit up in the air, I guess we will figure it out as we go.

Tom
Docked Twin Dolphin Marina
Bradenton, FL