Tuesday, January 30, 2007

West Palm



About a week ago we set sail to West Palm, 120 odd miles south of Port Canaveral - however (as expected i guess) had a few stories from our maiden voyage.

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.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

In the drink

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'Pirate training' with english Nic in Fort Lauderdale

Some happy chappy's ready to launch

Well we finally got our dam boat in the water! We bought this boat 5 weeks ago and took it out of the water to inspect the bottom (only thought it would take an hour) - since then its just been one thing after another. The fuel system, steering, engine, deck leaks etc etc etc. So much work... Considering we both thought we'd just buy a boat and leave a few days later this certainly brought us back down to earth.

Now we've pretty much got the boat ready and plan to leave Port Canaveral within the next week. We're both so rapt with the boat and can't wait to take it sailing, has been really frustrating 2 months!

After here its a 200mile sail south to West Palm beach or Fort Lauderdale, and then we'll head off to the Abaco's in the Bahamas.