For the trip we brought our friend Randy along as a cabin boy. We left with our buddy Dan on his boat 'Barely Twisted' and had a good time racing until we lost sight of each other. Due to a big one the night before we decided to stop half way at Fort Pierce - at midnight while coming in the channel our transmission cable snapped on the engine so we had little control of the boat. We ended up coming in real fast to a coast guard dock, stopping about 1 ft away from smacking their frigate!
The coast guard had a bit of a field day - no one really knew what to do with the 2 kiwi lads who couldn't move their boat from their 'off limits' military base, and being a NZ boat we strugelled to provide any US documentation they were used to seeing. We managed to get the boat going at 7am and after a few more inspections of registration, passports and saftey gear we were out of there.
We had another great sail to West Palm, a good breeze and 9 knots of boat speed at times. Our little brother Pete was skiing in Jackson Hole and decided he wanted to join us on the boat so flew to Fort Lauderdale - is really cool to have him aboard . We plan to fix up the boat and get the last of our shit sorted here this week, then head to the Bahama's with a weather window. We're provisioning pretty hard out as we don't want to have to come back to the states.
