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The Adventure Begins!
Thursday, March 19, 1930, Inport Maule Lake Marina, N. Miami Beach,
Florida.
Welcome to the Griffin Updates. The epic voyage chronicled in these Updates is to return our 1985 Fairline Corniche 31 from her winter layover in Miami, 1,200 miles north, to her homeport of Annapolis. To do this, we plan to run up the Intra-Coastal Waterway, or ICW, every daylight hour for the next 10 days. We will encounter numerous adventures and we will attempt to keep you apprised of the journey as it unfolds through a combination of these daily e-mail updates, and digital photos we will be posting on the new Griffin Website. (www.GriffinUpdates.com)
As the Griffin has yet to get underway, this first update will be brief.
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Griffin at her slip at Maule Lake Marina. |
We arrived at Ft. Lauderdale Airport at 2:30 this afternoon, and within an hour we were onboard Griffin. Not having eaten on the Southwest flight we decided to head straight to Houston's, a nearby restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner. At this point it is appropriate to describe my crew. After the misadventures in the southbound trip I though it would be a good idea to have trained medical assistance onboard. Only knowing two people with credentials, I sought them both out for the trip. At one point, it looked like we would have both an RN and a Paramedic on board, but as can frequently happen with a large time commitment like running the entire ICW, work interceded and I was down to just a Paramedic.
Tom Harner works with me at Champion Realty. In a past life he was a PJ. For those of you, like me, who don't know, that is the Air Force's Special Forces. Combat Search and Rescue. The guys who fight their way in behind enemy lines to bring out downed pilots. You would never suspect Tom was a trained killer if you met him in the office.
Back to dinner, I mentioned to Tom that we could go grab a quick burger and fries, before checking the boat out for our dawn departure tomorrow. He raised one eyebrow, in a Clint Eastwood-esque look, and said, "Oh, no. We're going to bring you back to Annapolis a lean, mean, fighting machine. I'll handle the food and cooking from here on."
At Houston's we dined on Mahi-mahi, brown rice and water. No bread, no butter, no oil, no fat. I ate all the parsley on my plate and we headed back to the boat to dive on the props.
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Our neighbors at Maule Lake have lived on this houseboat for 13 years at
the same slip. Note the Penthouse they built on the top deck. They have
two large dogs and several cats living onboard with them. |
The boat has been basically sitting for 3 months down here in the tropics. We had picked up a small coating of slime and seaweed, and a few barnacles on the props. We jumped into the cold water and spent 30 minutes scrubbing everything we could reach with snorkels. The bottom is reasonably clean now.
We spent about an hour going over the engines. They checked out fine, and fired right up so we are ready mechanically to head north. The only problem with the boat is a tear in the bimini from the high winds that roared through south Florida from the El Nino storms that did such havoc to trailer parks down here last month.
Tomorrow we are heading for Stuart, Florida to have dinner with Ann Macdonald and Jud Englestad, two Champions who now winter down here. Tom brought roller blades and a back pack so he could get to a grocery store, but we will see what we come up with in Stuart before he goes off at 16 mph on his skates in search of fat free food for our meals.
Warm regards,
Jon & Tom