Marathon to Miami 2015

Well, the visitors have left, we have a new dinghy, and we have enough provisions for a while. As Lauren used to say, "It's time to get out of this marina!" And so we shall. David and Emma are leaving the same time we are. They are heading for the Bahamas and we are heading back to Morehead City. We hope to make a slow trip back to Morehead. We have several places we want to check out. Stuart FL, Savannah GA, Darian GA, and Conway SC to name a few. Not sure how many of those we will get to but, we'll see.

 

Several boats have left the past few days and the harbor is looking empty. We'll see you next season.

David and Emma from FFF over for our last night at Marathon.

 

We left Marathon at about 6:30. As you can see in the picture below, it's just getting daylight. A few other boats are leaving today. We hope they have safe travels.

Sneaking out!

We have escaped from the harbor!

Heading out to sea.

The water was a little rougher than we wanted, but we knew as we changed directions, it would get better. So I took some bonine and took a nap and when I woke up it was better. Shay said he saw a waterspout behind us. Glad it stayed away from us!

 

Shay doesn't look too tired after his long day. It's good to be back traveling again. I think I stayed a little too long in Marathon. Don't get me wrong, I like it but 5 months was just a little too long.

 

 

You can see the boat on the chart plotter screen. We are south of Boca Chita Key. It is almost 5:00 pm and we have been traveling since 6:30 am. We thought about stopping at Rodriquez Key and spending the night, but decided to make it a long day and head for Miami. You can see that we are traveling faster than we usually do. Our normal cruising speed is 6.25 kts. and we are going 8.1 kts now. It is over 90 nm to Miami and to get there in the daylight, we had to go faster. Our average speed for the trip was 7.3 nm. Our total time was 12hrs and 15 minutes. A long day!

 

So we are back in Miami in Biscayne Bay. We are anchored in Key Biscayne Bight. We anchored here last fall on the way down. It gives a better protection from the ocean but we still get some rolling waves from the boats passing by. We can still see Stiltsville out in the harbor. The Miami skyline is always a beautiful sight.

Loved the beautiful clouds at sunset!

 

These are from our Delorme InReach tracing device. You can see our location a lot better than on the chart plotter. We bought this while in Marathon and this is the first trip we've used it on. We like the detail. We can sent our location to people so they can know where we are.

 

 

 

 

We had some dark clouds as we left the anchorage and they were beautiful. Hope its not bad weather coming in.

 

We decided to travel a little farther north in Miami to make our outside passage shorter. So we the anchorage and headed north on the inside. We have never been inside above the Venetian Causeway and are not sure what to expect on a Friday afternoon.

 

Heading up the waterway I noticed there were lots of unusual buildings. I took picture of some of them. Unusual shapes and colors.

 

As we went by the port we saw at least 5 cruise ships at dock. That's a lot of people going on vacation. But I like my cruise ship just fine!

 

We also saw a fire boat heading to a fire. And this unusual looking boat, very sleek looking.

 

 

 

This house had some unusual art in it's landscaping.

 

 

Our anchorage is in Oleta State Park near Baker's Haulover Inlet. We traveled about 14nm and took about 3 hours going 5.3kts. We decided to stop here to make our next day outside passage shorter. The trip up here was different. It's Friday afternoon, several bridges to get thru, lots of activity on the VHF radio, and lots of other boaters. And remember, this is new water to us. As we got closer to the anchorage we started seeing more and more small boats, full of people having fun on the water. It stayed crowded until about dark.

 

We had "fun" dodging the boats and the skinny water leading into the anchorage.

 

 It was a beautiful anchorage, but it was unusual. Most of the area around the anchorage was a park so we were in the middle of North Miami but surrounded by mangroves. We took off in the dinghy to explore. We talked to several other boaters about places to eat and about going out the inlet. The advice we got on the inlet was helpful, the advice on where to eat, not so much. We went to a restaurant on the main waterway, but the dock was not set up for dinghys. The pilings were covered with shells and the water was down. We are not going to tie up our new dinghy here!

So we turned down Oleta River and headed to a place we'd read about on a cruiser's guide. It was on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives a few years ago and was supposed to have great fish tacos. We traveled for miles down this winding river with no wind and the sun beating down on us. We could see tall building in the distance but nothing else. Finally we saw cars and then finally a dock. Our first "sign" should have been the condition of the dock. It was rough and didn't look like it had seen much use in years. We actually bumped on the way in. The place looked rough, but Shay said it was in a park and that's about all you could expect. We asked 2 women that were finishing up their meal how it was. They said they had the fish tacos and they were good. So we ordered the fish tacos and sat down to eat. We were very disappointed. The fish was smoked and I guess we don't really like smoked fish. It was an expensive meal at a dump and we were not impressed. Don't know if I will trust Guy on Triple D again.

We got up early the next morning to head out the inlet. We had been told to expect current, but were not ready for it. Shay said it felt like 5kts against us. He had to make a sharp 90 degree turn to get lined up with the opening and the current was making us do strange things. We didn't like the inlet and were glad the current didn't last long. The pictures don't do a good job of showing the waves coming toward us. We later read that the current was 2-3kts. Seemed stronger than that.

 

Looks pretty from the outside, not so much from the inside!