Soggy Daze in Miami

After a stormy night and a drenching downpour earlier today, the skies cleared and our hosts showed up to provide wonderful company and a delicious rib dinner on their back porch overlooking our two boats anchored in the canal. We took out a Fortress FX-37 stern anchor out via dinghy from Seminole as the morning thunder-bumper loomed in the west. At one point, the dinghy, tied to the stern, was about 1/3 full of rainwater, and I had to go out and pump it clear before I could get it safely into the skid and covered with its weather cover.


Arrangements have been made with our hosts for a repeat performance tomorrow evening with us providing meat for hamburgers. Before that, our hosts will take Jim and Jackie, and maybe Mary (if she can wake up) to early their early Sunday morning Starbucks coffee run on the Atlantic in nearby Miami Beach.

As in Seminole, we are running our generator 24/7 for air conditioning while sitting still in this wet-towel environment that the early end of spring has brought here. It’s the only way we can sleep. These 2-3 days will be the longest period of time I have run the generator since I bought the boat 26 years ago. While trying to shut it down today in order to check its oil, it failed to shut down when I held the shut-off switch down, and I had to manually hold the throttle linkage down to kill it. It took about twenty minutes to remove the fuel shut-off solenoid from the unit, extend the adjustment screw a few turns and re-install it – problem solved. I had been required to hold the switch down a long time to shut the generator off after installing the new solenoid in 2010 – glad to have it properly adjusted.

We have, by one count here, around fifty-plus bridges to clear between here and the beginning of the Okeechobee Waterway across the state. Many of them open on schedules rather than on demand, and many of them are over the 17-foot air-draft we can get down to by lowering our masts; so that is what we will do tomorrow.