Waiting in Fort Lauderdale

It has now been a week since we arrived in Fort Lauderdale. As much as it’s a nice place to be, and certainly warmer than home (although it IS cool for Florida) we are ready to leave and cross to the Bahamas. The weather has had other ideas.

The week has been busy, with both maintenance issues, and exploring the area. We are becoming quite good at using the public transportation, and have done our share of walking as well. 

We started off the week with big winds and cool temperatures, and were quite happy to be tied to the dock. It was so windy the first two nights that we both slept with earplugs to try to cut out the noise! Despite the fact that the beach is a five minute walk from the boat, it definitely has not been beach weather. However, we have discovered a wonderful French patisserie across the street and have become daily customers! And of course the search for the best Happy Hour continues!

One of the highlights of the week was an unexpected phone call from Hugh’s brother Adrian, who we mentioned many times as our “phone a friend” during our trip south last year. He is a semi-retired professional Captain, a wealth of marine and ICW knowledge, lives in Florida, and is currently driving a 125 foot private yacht. It seemed that he needed to move it from Miami to Fort Lauderdale and would we like to come along as “crew”. He did not have to ask us twice!

So Friday morning he picked us up at our marina, drove us to the marina where the boat stays, we all hopped in an Uber to Miami, and boarded Kimberlie.

Kimberlie

Wow, this is how the other half live! The owner of the yacht lives on it full time, so we really could not wander around, as this is her home. I did manage a quick peek around, and Hugh got a tour of the engine room with the boat’s engineer, which is probably twice the size of our main salon! The kitchen is huge, but despite the size they do not eat on board, ever!

Dining room

Main salon

The boat employs a full time engineer/manager and one full time crew, then hires Adrian and a stewardess as needed. We sat up in the pilothouse with Adrian and watched with awe as he maneuvered the boat away from the dock, out a narrow opening and into the ICW.  We passed through eight bascule bridges and arrived in Lauderdale and again watched him dock the boat in a space just about as big as the boat. Not much room for error! His many years of experience certainly was evident. Thanks again Adrian for a great day!

Adrian at the helm

So the maintenance issue we have dealt with while waiting is the house bank of batteries, which Hugh was sure were slowly failing. I will let him tell you what happened and the solution!

Before we left Fort Pierce, we unplugged from dock power to see how the solar and batteries survived the summer.  While the overnight electrical load was the same, we use about 65 amp-hours overnight between when the sun goes down and the solar panels stop producing electricity and when the sun comes up in the morning and the panels start producing again, the battery voltage (a measure of how much energy is left in the batteries) dropped to 11.7 volts meaning the batteries were less than 50% charged, whereas last year we never went below 12.4 volts or about 80% charged. Of course, the question is why … I left a solar panel hooked up over the summer to keep them charged, and the panels have a “smart” controller that is supposed to prevent overcharging the batteries.  To maximize the life of lead acid batteries they are supposed to be fully charged after being discharged and we had a hard time doing that in the Exumas when we anchored most of the time. Maybe that was the beginning of the end.  Anyhow, I wasn’t going to the Bahamas with suspect batteries and risk that we wouldn’t be able to keep the fridge and freezer running.  Three options were open to us, replace the batteries with the same mid level AGMs we had, although I was leery about that when we had not got the life out of them that we should have expected.  A second option was to go the least expensive route and pick up regular flooded lead acid batteries from Costco or Walmart, but of course that would mean modifying the battery boxes to make them fit, or, go high tech and get lithium batteries.  George and Bev, friends of ours on another Hanse 415 Breeze On went with lithium batteries a couple of years ago and are very happy with them.  Key advantages are that they can be recharged much more quickly, important for us when we want to minimize running our main engine or our generator.  They are happy living life between 20% and 90% charged whereas lead acid batteries shouldn’t be discharged more than 50%, so they offer much more usable capacity, and finally, they are much lighter.  George recommended Alex from Sea Tek in Marathon, so I gave him a call, and luckily he was planning to travel to Fort Lauderdale for some other business and offered to come up and swap out our batteries for the lithium (LiFePO lithium, ferrous, phosphate to be accurate) batteries.  The install went very quickly and after a night of charging we unplugged and in spite of a couple of days of very overcast rainy days where the solar put in virtually nothing, we consumed 190 Amp-hours of our 400 Amp-hour bank and still had a couple of days capacity!  Suffice to say I’m very pleased.  My only reservation is that the alternator will be working a lot harder with the lithiums because they accept a much higher charge for a longer period (hence the fast recharging).  Hopefully the alternator is up to the challenge.  I have a spare!

So now we are hoping to cross tomorrow, although we just looked at the ocean and there is no way we are going out there unless it calms down. I have never seen the horizon as “wavy” as it was today. The plan is to go overnight and get to the Berry Islands, check in there and stay a day or two, and then hop south to the Exumas.

Windy day!

Fortunately, we have met another boat also waiting to cross (Mike and Julie on Blue Train). They are also from Toronto, and even better, Mike grew up in the same neighborhood that I did, and his mother lived in the same retirement home as mine does. I love “small world” stories! So we are going to cross together, which is great, as they say, safety in numbers!

Unfortunately, we recently found out that our friends and buddy boat from last year, Bob and Sheila, have decided not to cross over to the Bahamas this year. They will explore the Florida Keys and west coast. We will miss their company!

So with laundry done, and provisions topped up, we are ready to go. Let’s hope tomorrow is a good day.

And so the adventure continues ... one day at a time!