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Offshore!
Saturday, March 21, 0700, Underway, Indian River, ICW Mile 984, Onboard Griffin.

We woke up yesterday at 0600 for an early departure from Maule Lake Marina in N. Miami Beach. Our goal for the day was to get to Stuart, Florida for Dinner with old friends. What's that saying about the best laid plans of mice and men?

Jon driving out of Maule Lake for the last time on this trip.

We started the engines and had our first mechanical glitch of the trip. Remember from update one, we had serviced our two Volvo Turbocharged Aftercooled Marine Diesel Engines when we first got to the boat (Jeremy: Twin Volvo TAMD-40Bs, 165 hp each). Everything checked out fine on Thursday and we ran them for 30 minutes at fast idle to make sure they were ready to go.

We started the engines at 6:15 and found that we had no RPM indication from the port engine. It was running but the tach said the RPM was zero. We checked the flybridge and also no indication, so we were narrowing the problem down to the sending unit. We popped open the engine hatches. At first, I optomistically hoped I had just kicked a wire loose while climbing over the engine checking fluids, but then I remembered we had optested the engines after we closed up the hatches so nobody had been in there since the tach last worked.

With the hatches open, I picked up the cell phone and called my old Navy Engineer buddy, Joe Pisula in Hampton, VA. Joe has a marine repair business and has spent time working on and cruising Griffin, so I thought he might be able to give a tech assist. He concurred that it was probably a wiring problem, but he suggested that either way, we could make it home to Annapolis by setting the RPM with the Starboard Diesel and matching the port by listening for the sound when the engines were in sync.

Not relishing the thought of doing that for 1,200 miles I pulled out the Volvo owners manual and Joe helped me figure out where the Tach RPM pickup is on the engine. Tom and I pulled the electrical connections off and they looked pretty corroded. We sandpapered the contacts and pluged everything back in and fired up the engines. It worked! We closed up the engine compartment which is under the main Salon and finished taking in shore power and everything else we needed to do to get underway. Underway finally at 0730 after a quick follow-up call to Joe, and a promise of several beers in Norfolk on Friday or Saturday depending on our progress north.

We headed up the ICW from our starting point at mile 1077. This southern stretch is mostly a minimum wake speed zone. There are basically three types of speed zones down here in south Florida. Idle Speed - No Wake means we creep along at about 5 mph and 1,000 RPM. Slow speed - Minimum Wake gives us 7-8 MPH at 1,500 RPM. Normal Operation is the third zone. It is still restricted to 25 or 30 MPH depending on where we are, so we kick it up to 3,000 RPM and go 18-20 mph. The engines are rated to 3,600 RPM so while the RPM may sound high compared to Cats or Detroits, we have a reduction gear to get the speed back down where the boat needs it.

Tom drove us through Ft. Lauderdale. Note the Forbes yacht, Highlander, in the background.

From Miami to Ft. Lauderdale is an interesting stretch of the waterway if you like huge yachts and big houses. We cruised along in awe, admiring Steve Forbes' Dad's yacht, Highlander among many others. Malcom Forbes used to really cruise that thing all over the world. When Highlander was in Annapolis as part of Forbes' build-up to his run for President, she was by far the biggest Yacht in the harbor. Here in Ft. Lauderdale she is still 1st quartile, but barely!

After 3 hours of going slow, Tom suggested that to pick up the time we lost with engine repairs we should go out through an inlet and cruise north Offshore. No speed zones, no sailboats to overtake, no bridges. Just big waves to deal with. We checked the weather on our VHF radio. Winds out of the south at 20. Waves 4-6 feet near shore. 8 ft offshore. With the wind coming from astern, that sounded pretty good to us. Kind of a sleigh ride down the waves, if they turned out to be as big as forecast.

There is a little problem with cruising offshore. It's getting out there and back in. The ICW is basically a channel cut in the back bay between the barrier island and the main land. If you think of Ocean City, there is the mainland, then you cross a 3 or 4 mile causeway/bridge and you get to what is in fact a barrier island. Ocean City is built right on the island, and that is the same thing that we have down here. The Corps of Engineers have dredged a channel in this protected back bay and that is the ICW.

Every 20 miles or so, the ocean or the Corps have broken through the barrier island to make an inlet. Some of the inlets are huge and ships go in and out. These are well marked, dredged and easy to get in and out of in normal weather. They are also few and far between. Maybe 1 out of 5 inlets are this way and we had passed the nearest two hours earlier at Ft. Lauderdale. We were coming up on Hillsboro Inlet. It's very small and the charts were filled with dire warnings about not attempting it without local knowledge due to constantly shifting sandbars.

We turned off the ICW and eased under a low bridge as we headed for the inlet. We could see the surf breaking gently over the shoal. We passed a dredge. We were heading out when we came to our senses, overcame our natural male disninclination to ask, and turned back to the dredge for directions. We hailed the Captain and asked the way out. He told us where to go, and that we should not only ignore, but stay far away from one of the channel marker bouys because it had dragged it's mooring and was well into shallow water. We thanked him and headed out.

We started pounding into the waves as we headed 2 miles offshore, but as soon as we turned to our northerly course the ride settled down. We picked up a 2 knot shove from the fringes of the gulf stream and cruised up the coast at 22 mph, just cranking off the miles towards Stuart.

Tom started the generator and we had a hot meal of Chef Boyardee Ravioli with all the spices Tom could find. We estimated our arrival time at the small St. Lucie River Inlet at 2:00pm. At about 1:00 Tom pointed out that the wind was shifting from South to Southwest and there were dark clouds forming over the mainland. We cruised on, hoping we would beat the storm. We did, arriving two minutes before a thunderstorm and drenching rain hit.

After an uneventful inlet entry we tied up at Sailfish Marina in Manatee Pocket, Stuart, Florida, Sailfish Capital of the World. We took on 96 gallons of Diesel and washed the boat down. Ann and Jud Englestad picked us up and took us on a tour of Stuart, including their home with a tiled garage floor and a pool with Lanai. We went to Dinner out on the barrier island and then they graciously took us to a grocery store so we could stock up. I left the Cheez-Its on the shelf and let Tom load us up with fruits and vegatables.

It is amazing to us how exhausting this cruising stuff is. Tom said I was snoring in Ann and Jud's car on the way back to the boat. We slept like logs and lit off the engines this morning for a 0630 departure and we are back underway.

Don't forget the photos at coile.com/griffin. Tomorrow we will include a full description of Griffin, along with the adventures of the day.

Warm regards,

The Griffin Crew, Jon & Tom

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