Life looks pretty good in the Florida Keys. Boot Key Harbor is quite full of boaters and boats contentedly swinging bow to stern in the vast mooring field, and Key West is brimming with tourists. Jugglers and mimes and unicyclists and fire eaters all cajole the sunset crowds in Mallory Square. The man with the manic laugh who trains cats is still putting on his show – I personally might be wishing for a different life by now. And the cats? They walk and jump and sit, but their tails are switching all the time. I wonder???
The Navy has roiled up the anchorage, insisting that everyone move 400 yards from Fleming Island (present limit is 100 yards), saying that more munitions are being stored there and boaters should be clear of the ‘explosive zone’.
But we are focused on business. My bicycle shuttles too and fro on errands, last minute laundry, groceries, mail, phone calls, reordering our lives, again. Hardly time to admire the palms, cycads and datura that burst through every picket fence, the sweet old cottages and the art-encrusted bicycles, not to mention a cast of characters who could almost fill a bar in Star Wars.
And now, finally, taking a look at the sailing directions from here to Mexico, it seems there’s quite a stir of ocean between us and our destination.

SOUTH FLORIDA via WATERWAY:
We did this section once on Absolute years ago and thought ‘never again.’ But the offshore weather was gusty and contrary, so… There are roughly 21 opening bridges between West Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale, – they, plus Ft. Pierce to the north and Miami to the south are the ‘safe’ ocean inlets, or in our case, outlets. Most bridges have schedules, hour and half hour, and even if you step smartly you can’t quite get them all timed right.
We got lucky, following a sand barge through a couple unscheduled openings. The gears under several bridges looked freshly painted, in peach and lime, or whatever those Florida football team colors are. Not a single squashed pigeon either, here in the land of pelicans.
Before the buildings got too tall and too numerous, we could roll out the jib for a power-assist. We even found an anchorage on the waterway, north of Ft. Lauderdale at Lettuce Lake (no lake, no lettuce).

Next day, Christmas Eve, we droned on. The weather was squally, the sky dark and for while we thought there had been some disaster – there were no people, no lights in the houses, and Santas and snowmen were collapsed in puddles on the lawns. But then the landscapers and pool boys appeared, and there was always traffic being stopped for us on the bridges. I could imagine people cursing the delay, or, I hoped, being glad for the respite.

Florida is said to have one of the highest unemployment rates and highest foreclosure rates in the country (also highest number of lightening strikes), but it’s hard to say what we were seeing when we saw so many empty buildings. The traffic reports are always full of congestion, breakdowns and delays.

In the “how times have changed” department, I hooked up my new wifi antenna (thanks Alf 124, whoever you may be) while waiting for a bridge, and was able to send a digital photo to a supplier, call him and arrange for the correct part, and have it shipped to an address I arranged in Key West, all in the 20 minutes we waited for the bridge!

We even bashed our way out the Ft. Lauderdale channel that Christmas Eve afternoon, but when the short steep seas kept washing the deck, the wind moved well forward, and the GPS quit, we turned around, slunk apologetically back through SE 17th St. and Las Olas bridges again, and anchored in the middle of the Middle River, alone.

Good thing too, because just then Amazon came around the bend. Next day we had a nice brunch (shrimp and grits) in the cockpit. Conditions lightened all around, and we spent Christmas night reaching down the coast to Miami, chatting with family on the cell phone all the way.

Florida isn’t exactly a remote nation, but it’s not like home either. For one thing, on this last day of fall, I’m wearing shorts. I don’t need to huddle in bed at about 7:30, so sometimes am awake even at 9:30, like tonight!

For another, now we have to deal with where to put all the thick winter stuff, the socks, polypro and comforters. My vote is Goodwill, but maybe not too hastily. I remember, at the West Palm Beach Greens Market on a 40 degree January Saturday, seeing women in furs and ski clothes. Their dogs dressed funny too, including a dachshund bundled in a jacket that look like a frankfurter bun, and something 4-legged in a fitted yellow slicker.

You know you’re in Florida when there are sidewalks, with curb cutouts, and bikes accessorized with drink holders, cell phone holders, rod holders, even trailers, which are a step up from shopping carts for the some, perhaps including me, one of these days. Anyhow, I’m taking notes just in case!

Our little folding bikes have emerged. We can cover lots of ground on them, and even more on public transportation. This time I notice just a few more people like me (white, female, not quite young) on the buses, though not on bikes. Or it that just hope?

Here in the Palm Beach area, there are megayachts along Lake Worth, larger than the properties they’re docked in front of. They have aircraft lights, and could be confused with phone towers. I think I’m using the wifi connection of one of those megayachts now.

Inshore are bands of communities from the 30s, 40s, 50s, pock-marked with perkily-named gated communities from more recent booms. Fast-moving squads of weed whackers and leaf blowers roam the sidewalks, and the tinted windows of many cars make it hard to know if we pedalers/pedestrians can safely pass before them. Move further inland and you’ll be in big-box-store land. Could be Omaha, or San Diego, but it’s Florida, where one might buy and transplant a huge banyan tree (via barge) for $155,000.

In the papers are two stories. Florida is making a positive but controversial move towards Everglades respect and restoration by agreeing to purchase a huge parcel of land from US Sugar, although there are many challenges. But also, a thousand people, including all the local politicos, attended the funeral of yet another shooting victim, a hard-working young man who left behind six children and a pregnant wife.

I wish it were more remote.

Just over the Georgia line, finally, a day in which we removed our gloves during the afternoon. I didn’t wear my waterproof pants either. Nights are still in the 30s, but our nests are fully feathered and I’m feeling the warmth just over the horizon (or is that the loom of Savannah?). A lovely anchorage in an unnamed creek off the Bear River; a few quiet moments in the few daylit minutes left, listening to the birds in the marsh, whose voice boxes ratcheted and wound down like a pinball machine, then to an airplane droning past, and to gunfire in the distance, automatic, Doug said.

This stretch of the waterway is full of ‘alerts’ mostly about shoaling in the dredged cuts that connect the rivers, so we’re extra-careful. I like going at low tide, because I believe we’re sure to get off when the tide comes in, and I have that feeling longer. Doug says he’d rather not run aground in the first place, but he too wants ‘insurance’, so in his world it would always be halfway into the flood. At high tide, I get nervous, he gets happy.

The prospect of visiting our friends Lynn and George, off St. Catherine’s Sound, for Thanksgiving was enticing, but a shoal at the mouth of her creek made me anxious. We arrived nearby at the middle of the ebb, and used the luxury of spare time for a calming reconnoiter. It took half an hour to dig out the Avon and blow it up, mount the outboard, and load our kit, which includes a little fish finder/depth sounder suction-cupped to the transom.

We spent an hour zigging around checking our possible routes. Then, cautiously, but now with some assurance, and the added insurance of the rising tide, we did the deed.

At the dock we checked the electronic chart, to find that what we had done was exactly what we would have penciled in as the optimum route. This was despite some apparent changes in both nearby shoals. Lovely as the vast sea of marsh grass is, and it’s one of my favorite landscapes, it’s hard to get your bearings there. If that crabber moves his floats before we leave, especially the blue one, I’ll miss them.

That’s one of the reasons these early days are called shakedown cruises.

Much of the time between Galesville and Charleston has been a struggle to adapt the volume of our ‘stuff’ to the volume of storage available on the boat. I talk a good game about living clutter free, but I seem to have two of everything from the double life we’ve lived for the past decade, except a place to put it now.

We’ve made good progress, but still every day finds us looking for something, shuffling things around, repacking, and leaving little piles of treasure next to a dumpster (‘closer to a good home here’). You can only move some of this stuff so many times before it makes that one-way trip over the rail no matter how handy it might be some day or how much it once cost or who gave it to you. In its way Arion, at 35’ long and 9’2” beam, had a better mix of useful storage options than Galivant’s deep vats in the cockpit and chopped up shelves with small doors in the cabin.

I’m trying to remind myself: each thing that occupies space ‘just in case’ keeps something else away, something like clarity and lightness of spirit. But my fist sometimes just won’t open!