To Sail or Not to Sail

My lovely wife and I love to sail. Before the hurricanes that hit the Gulf and most of Florida, we planned on heading south after Thanksgiving. The idea was to tow the Oday 19 sailboat down and do a mix of sailing and camping.

Then the storms hit. We moved our departure date until after New Years. The idea behind the delay was to allow time for clean up and repairs. We've also taken a few areas completely off our travel radar. All in all, not a major change.

Right now I've been trying to find out exactly how bad things are in southern Florida. Marathon in the Keys is moving right along to getting back to business. Key West wasn't hit all that hard to begin with, but a lot of live aboards lost their boats. Many of them were pretty beat up to begin with and anchored in a marginal area. However, they were people's homes.

It came as a surprise to discover that almost all the marinas in the Miami area are still closed. Because of that I'm going to have to do some research to see who's open and who's not. While we don't like to spend much time in marinas, they are good places to get out of bad weather. Some I'm going to call on the phone to get the real story.

Boat traffic still isn't very heavy yet in Florida waters, so not a lot of information is making it to the sailing nets and boards. There are scattered reports of sunken wrecks, debris hazards, and missing markers. Some of those markers have been bent over, submerged, and have become dangerous in their own right. Navigational marker replacement was already heavily backlogged before the storms.

We are going to wait another month or so before making the final decision. If the boating situation still looks sketchy, we'll leave the sailboat at home. For some strange reason my lovely wife isn't too keen on losing another boat.

Worse come to worse, it will be a season of just camping. Enough campgrounds have reopened. There's room to bring the kayak along, so we'll get at least some time on the water.

-Sixbears