Ed Robinson's Blog, page 8

No Name Harbor

I have some good/great things to say about No Name Harbor, but I also have some words of warning.

Bad news first: It’s a small anchorage, with deep water. It gets crowded. For the most part, you can’t put out enough scope to really feel comfortable. At high tide, there is close to fifteen foot depths in some spots. A 7 – 1 ratio would require just over 100 feet of chain/rode. That’s impossible to do here. There simply isn’t enough room. The picture above was taken when the harbor was almost empty. There were twice as many boats when we came in.

The bottom consists of a sand/mud mixture that is quite soft. We got a our hook stuck pretty well. When we pulled it up it held a bushel basket sized glob of bottom.

What’s crowded? Swinging on the hook in close proximity to your neighors, closer than most mooring fields. What’s really crowded? Weekends:

 

It can get crazy with all the powerboats coming in from Miami and surrounding areas.

 

Now the good news: It’s beautiful and well protected. During the week, it’s less crowded and peaceful. There’s a free pumpout station on the sea wall. It’s a do it yourself operation that works just fine. There are plenty of trash cans so you can get rid of your garbage, no problem. No Name Harbor is inside of a state park. The park is very nice. There are excellent beaches a short walk away, with nice facilities. There’s a Winn Dixie about a mile away. It’s also very nice. There are hiking/biking trails, fishing piers, lighthouse tours and picnic areas with restrooms. There’s even a washer and a dryer! It’s a $1.25 per load, which is very cheap.

There’s a restaurant directly on the sea wall called the Boater’s Grill. We haven’t tried it yet, but it looks nice, if not a bit pricey.

One last thing you should know before your visit. The park asks for twenty dollars per day to anchor and spend the night. It’s an honor system, with a few boxes on land near the wall. We haven’t noticed anyone paying it. We haven’t seen any attempts at enforcement. The “rules” say there are sporadic checks for receipts. We paid our twenty bucks just in case. There is also a limit on how many days you can stay. You can not stay overnight tied to the wall.

.We’ve heard some horror stories about anchoring here, so we were a bit apprehensive. Our Monday through Friday stay was extremely pleasant, so I’m glad we came. The weekends though, are just plain nuts. Remember that when making plans.

Product Alert

Don’t buy this stuff!!

Here’s our experience; Our dinghy was 18 months old. We rarely can spare the fresh water to give a good scrubbing. Occassionally, we’ll get enough rain to assist in cleanup. It got pretty dirty and regular products weren’t getting it clean.

We bought Starbrite Inflatable Boat Cleaner and Protectant from West Marine. It worked like magic. Our dinghy was restored to like-new condition. We were thrilled . . . at first.

As soon as we used the dinghy, we noticed a sticky residue. I sat on the tube and when I got up my shorts stuck to the boat. Over the next few days, the stickiness collected more dirt and grime. We tried scrubbing it off, but it remained sticky. Over the next few weeks, the rapidly collecting grime made the dinghy look worse than ever.

We tried every type of cleaning product we had, to no avail. Finally, we mixed Dawn and Bleach and used a 3M scrubbing pad. We worked hard and used a lot of elbow grease. We got about 80% of the dirt off, but the stickiness is still there.

Our dinghy is forever sticky! 

 

Your results may vary, but I can’t recommend this product, other than to recommend that you just say NO.

Bahama Breeze

My newest book is now available at Amazon.

Bahama Breeze

Breeze and Holly retreat to the far reaches of the Bahamas to ponder the mysteries of love and find meaning in their lives. There are differences to reconcile, but in many ways they are very much alike. Has Breeze met his match?

Meade Breeze

Part rebel, part knight in rusty armor, and every ounce his own man, Meade Breeze is a rugged, reclusive Florida boat bum. He has special talent for attracting sexy women. His skill at handling boats is matched only by his knack for getting into, and out of, one predicament after another. In this fifth novel starring Breeze, his challenge is one of the heart.

Click the link to order:

http://www.amazon.com/Bahama-Breeze-Trawler-Trash-Book-ebook/dp/B01D3UME84/ref=pd_sim_351_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=51c1Z12lJ7L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_UX300_PJku-sticker-v3%2CTopRight%2C0%2C-44_OU01_AC_UL160_SR100%2C160_&refRID=18HH3J7CQQYG4M7N7TXM

Trouble Brewing in Miami

Today, about an hour ago, the Miami Beach Marine Police issued warning citations to all of the boats in the South Beach anchorage. Tickets will be given out to any boats remaining there next Sunday, and the ticket is based on Miami Beach local ordinance 66-8, which I’ll copy below.

I was informed of this by ‘Mike’, who’s earlier letter about feeling threatened you’ve already read here. Now the police are taking action, obviously at the orders of the City.

Mike is a veterinarian in Miami Beach, a professional. His boat is a 2002 Hunter 46 – and you can see by the photos that this is NOT a derelict boat in any way, shape or form. He takes it out regularly when his schedule permits, it does not sit and gather barnacles.

(Wally Moran, Sailing and Cruising)

For some brief background, the State of Florida addressed the local anchoring restriction debacle back in 2009. The Mooring Field Pilot Program wasn’t perfect, but it was a compromise that most cruising boaters could live with. As a result, individual municipalities no longer had the right to restrict or ban anchoring within their city limits. Now Miami is doing just that.

Here’s what city leaders think of boaters:

The city commission finds and declares that the proliferation of watercraft in use for residential purposes or otherwise stored in the waters of Biscayne Bay within the boundaries of the city have had and have a deleterious effect upon the health, safety and welfare of the residents of the city in that they potentially serve as a source for pollution and contamination though discharge of human waste as well as garbage, refuse, debris, oil and other obnoxious products; constitute aesthetic pollution, being unsightly and interfering with views and enjoyment by the public of the beautiful vistas of Biscayne Bay; constitute nuisance and invasions of the privacy of homeowners and other residents of property adjacent or proximate to the bay; constitute a threat to the safety, health and welfare of residents of the city through unregulated activity upon and aboard such watercraft; and numerous other problems and disadvantages which adversely affect the quality of life of the residents and visitors to the city.

Read that again. Unbelievable.

Here’s Mike:

And below is his vessel:

Yup, the claim is that this guy is having a deleterious effect on the health, safety and welfare of the citizens of Miami. One week from now he’ll be given a ticket for violating a city ordinance, an ordinance that shouldn’t hold up in a court challenge. He’s prepared to fight it.

Others are organizing to protest. If you can get your boat to Miami on Sunday, please do so. Here’s a link to the event:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1561062817539090/

Come out and let’s celebrate Mike’s getting an anti anchoring ticket – and show Miami Beach and Florida we will not be pushed around.

If this crap is allowed to stand, it WILL start happening all over Florida.

Redeeming Breeze now Available

Get your copy at the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/Redeeming-Breeze-Trawler-Trash-Book-ebook/dp/B01BQSF37O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1455402392&sr=1-1&keywords=Redeeming+Breeze

Redeeming Breeze

Breeze is trying to leave his troubled past behind. His dream of a beautiful woman on a Caribbean island remains elusive. One day he’s sitting on his boat, minding his own business. The next day he’s on the run from Russian mobsters with two sex slaves aboard. Doing the right thing turns out to be a tricky business.

Meade Breeze

Part rebel, part knight in rusty armor, and every ounce his own man, Meade Breeze is a rugged, reclusive Florida boat bum. He has special talent for attracting sexy women. His skill at handling boats is matched only by his knack for getting into, and out of, one predicament after another. In this fourth novel starring Breeze, he faces his most dangerous challenge yet.

 

Killing Florida

 

It all started with man’s desire to “Drain the Swamp.” Those pesky everglades were no good for development or agriculture. Who cares about a bunch of mosquitoes and alligators?

So we drained the damn swamp. We built a huge dam below Lake Okeechobee. We created land for developers. We created land for sugar cane. We decided to subsidize the sugar companies to keep them in business. The sugar interests got filthy rich. Now they send their filthy water to both coasts of Florida in an effort to kill new ecosystems. Hey, we killed the Glades, why not kill SW Florida and the Treasure Coast?

 

Florida has received too much rain this year. The lake is holding too much water. We don’t let that water flow through the river of grass as God intended though. We hold it back. When we have too much, we discharge it into the Caloosahactee and St. Lucie Rivers. The lake water is ugly and dangerous. It’s full of fertilizer and nutrients and just plain muck. The excess nutrients cause algae blooms to explode. The waters around Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel are dead-zones now. There’s no oxygen. There’s Red Tide. There’s mud.

 

Below picture from under the Matanzas Bridge at Fort Myers Beach. It’s one of the places we frequent in our boat. It used to have nice clear, even blue, water.

Now look at Sanibel. The dark water meets the Gulf:

Over on the east coast:

Makes you want to book your vacation now doesn’t it?

 

I despise getting into politics, but this is a political matter. You see, the citizens of Florida voted overwhelmingly for something called Amendment 1. 75% of voters passed something they thought would go a long way to solving this very problem, but it hasn’t happened. For more info on Amendment 1 see here:

http://floridawaterlandlegacy.org/sections/page/about

Instead, the Florida legislature has gone against the will of the people to use the earmarked money for other purposes, or to simply ignore the mandate to purchase land below the dam.

Record rains have not made the situation better as the lake level is rising at the same time the state was back-pumping farm water into Okeechobee.

With levels around 17 feet above sea level, well over the Army Corps mandated maximum of 15.5 feet above sea level, the only way to quickly drain the lake is to send billions of gallons of dirty water down the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers.

Measurements taken by the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation show more than 12,000 cubic feet per second flowing through the W.P. Franklin Lock and Dam, an Army Corps structure that holds back lake waters. Discharges begin harming the Caloosahatchee River and its estuary when levels reach 2,800 cubic feet per second. That translates into billions of gallons, and it’s still coming. More rain, more releases, more devastation to coastal estuaries.

 

In the interest of time and space. I’ll include a petition addressed to the Governor.

https://www.change.org/p/rick-scott-stop-the-lake-okeechobee-discharges-into-the-st-lucie-river-and-estuaries?recruiter=56799770&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=share_facebook_responsive&utm_term=mob-xs-share_petition-no_msg&fb_ref=Default

 

And so that you understand it’s not just a state problem, but also a federal one. Here’s the contact information for the point person at the Army Corps of Engineers:

Lt. Colonel Jennifer A. Reynolds

Deputy District Commander for South Florida

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District

South Florida Restoration Program Office

1400 Centrepark Boulevard

West Palm Beach, FL 33401-7402 

Email:  Jennifer.A.Reynolds@usace.army.mil
Phone:  561-472-8891


Someone more knowledgeable than I could write a book on this disaster, but I couldn’t let this go by without saying my piece. Horrible water combined with dubious efforts to restrict anchoring in Florida are making this state seem less and less like a boating paradise all the time.

See the Facebook page for the SWFL Clean Water Movement also. Pictures above taken from their page, and from the page of Arthur Schmidt. Some of the photos may have been reproduced from various news sources.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SWFLcleanwater/

 

 

The Exhaust Elbow Blues

Our trawler is powered by a single Lehman 120. These are classic engines found in thousands of vessels throughout the world. They are extremely reliable, durable and simple to work on. They will chug along at low rpms for thousands hours. They do have two peculiar traits though.

One oddity is that you have to change the oil in the injector pump. The other is that the exhaust elbow is guaranteed to fail at around five years. It’s cast iron. It has saltwater passing through it. It rusts out eventually and develops a hole in it. This is usually on the bottom where you can’t see it developing.

Our is well over five and overdue to be replaced. I noticed a lot of rust below the elbow, collecting on the heat exchanger. I ordered a new elbow along with a gasket and new bolts. There are only four bolts. No big deal, right?

As with many boat jobs, something that should take an hour or two has stretched out over three days now. The job still isn’t finished. Here’s the old one, finally removed. It had a pin hole surrounded by rust. That is – until I beat the living daylights out of it with a hammer.

Notice the bottom right bolt hole. That bolt refuses to come out. I couldn’t fit a socket on it, until I made the large hole with my trusty hammer. Who knew there were so many uses for a hammer on a boat? Day one consisted of removing three bolts, then cussing at the fourth for a few hours.

Day two consisted of acquiring special sockets for extracting pesky, slightly rounded bolts and trying again. Nope, nope, and nope.

Day three consisted of acquiring a torch (Mapp Gas), and heating the stubborn bolt. Still nope. The local mechanical guru in Boot Key Harbor (Diesel Don), attempted to cut out around the bolt with a Dremel Tool and a tungsten carbide bit.

Almost worked. No cigar. We did manage to get some penetrating oil into the threads at this point. We waited over a beer, then tried the socket again. PLING! Broke the head off the bolt. Bottom right, now painted red:

The only good thing is that it didn’t break off flush with the exhaust manifold. I’m soaking it in Sea Foam Deep Creep overnight. We’ll see what day four brings.

Meanwhile, the new elbow waits patiently to be installed:

The day a boat repair/project goes simply and smoothly and faster or easier than anticipated . . . well, when pigs fly, hell freezes over, etc.

My New Pet Peeve

A lot of us cringe when we see a vessel underway with its fenders hanging overboard. It’s a sign of a boat that rarely leaves the dock. It’s also a good way to loose said fenders. I’ve found at least a dozen fenders floating over the past few years, some in excellent shape.

But there is a new trend developing that is equally disturbing to me.

We are currently in Boot Key Harbor, Marathon, Florida. There are boats here from all over the country, and even from foreign countries. The above vessel in Canadian.

This guy must be afraid someone is going to ram him from behind!

 

Aria, is a nicely appointed vessel, well-kept, even has fender covers. Still, they hang outboard of the vessel.

There’s another set of three hanging on the port side of the bow.

 

I don’t know about you, but all these fenders hanging everywhere just doesn’t sit well with me. It looks junky, and again, it’s a really good way to loose them, especially if underway. In some cases I wonder; why so many fenders in the first place?

And it’s clearly a sailboat thing. I understand they have less room to store them. I have not noticed this phenomenom on trawlers. They either have racks to hold them or enough storage to stow them away when not it use.

Maybe some of you sailors can chime in with your opinion. Anyway, cheers from the middle Keys.

All as Planned (Except for that one bad day)

Miss Kim during a rough patch. She HATES high seas. She hates me when I put her in harms way. Actually we were in no immediate danger, but it was quite uncomfortable.

We’d had three glorious weeks of near perfect weather. We’d seen the sights, met up with old friends, and run out of reasons not to continue south to the Keys. We left Fort Myers Beach and had a lovely trip to Marco Island. The next morning we left Marco at first light. The winds were near ten knots out of the northeast. As you leave Marco, you travel southwest for a while, in order to round the Cape Romano Shoals. We had a true following sea, not too strong. It was pleasant.

It didn’t stay that way.

The winds gradually increased to twenty knots. We were still okay, until we turned to the southeast bound for Little Shark River. Now the seas were beam-to. We had thirty miles to go and Leap of Faith was rolling side to side. Our vessel does not like running in the trough. She’s a bit top heavy. She’s slow. She agrees with Kim when it comes to high seas.

I kept us upright and reasonably situated for twenty of those miles. Then the thunderstorms started to pop up. We just caught sight of land when the first blows came. The twenty knot winds that I’d sorta found a rhythm with, became thirty knots with higher gusts. The rain came down. I put down all the Eisenglass, but then I couldn’t see the crab pots. I put my windshield section back up and covert the instruments to protect them from the rain. I figured out that the storms were moving from my left to right, so I diverted to the left. We cleared the first storm, only to see another dead ahead. There is only so much running you can do at six knots, but I veered left again. We managed to avoid the center, but not the wind. Nothing left to do but ride it out.

Hence Kim on the deck of the flybridge, wearing a life-vest, reading the good book, personal locator beacon on her wrist. Not a happy camper.

Eventually, we made the entrance to Little Shark River and we were safe. It was actually pretty nice in there this time, until dark. The skeeters come out at dark. I heard two of them talking. Should we eat him here, or carry him home to eat him? We went in to mosquito control mode and survived the night.

The next day we left at first light again and had a wonderful trip to Boot Key Harbor. (except for the 147 trillion lobster traps)

She was much happier when we reached the Seven Mile Bridge.

Life Aboard in SW Florida / Photo Essay

We left Punta Gorda on October first to begin our slow migration south to Marathon. We spent two weeks at Cayo Costa, anchored in Pelican Bay. We filled out time by beachcombing mostly. Had some friends come out in their boats to visit. It was a time to relax, and enjoy the peace and serenity. It was time well spent.

We finally moved on, spending a week in Fort Myers Beach before making our three-day dash down to the  Keys. It was not uneventful, but that’s a story for another day. We’ll spend the winter here in Boot Key Harbor (on a mooring ball). We really hope to cross to the Bahamas in the spring.