The truth is that it’s been a long two months since we arrived in Florida. We came here at the end of January with hopes of fixing up the boat in a couple weeks and then heading back south towards the Caribbean, but that was way too optimistic. It wasn’t until Sunday morning that we finally cast away from in Fort Lauderdale with our friends Elliott (“Eli”) and Jimmy (“Swifty”) aboard, cracking jokes and high fiving each other as the famous 17th Street Causeway bridge opened up above us for the last time and finally set us free again into the Atlantic Ocean. 30 hours later, about half way between Key West and Cuba, we began experiencing electrical problems that prevented us from charging our main battery bank, then an electrical short took our new autopilot offline. With two major problems like this, we switched to our backup systems and quickly decided to make U-Turn for Florida rather than trying to fix these things somewhere further south. This experience is a demoralizing one and our spirits are touching new lows for this journey. If there is a silver lining it’s that we’d much rather have these problems here near Florida where yacht services are the best in the world, although we’re getting tired of repeating this logic to ourselves.

People considering a long distance sailing voyage should be cautious about what they read and hear. It is not the case that each day is filled with fun and excitement, in fact most days aren’t. Our hope is that by the end of the voyage we’ll look back at the whole experience and see that the effort was well worth it – that seems to be a reasonable expectation based on what other circumnavigators tell us. It’s also not true that sailing is the greatest challenge of a trip like this – the sailing part is actually pretty easy, the most important skills being diligence and patience. The real challenge is keeping the boat and its numerous mechanical and electrical systems working reliably. Boats like ours are incredibly complex – if you walk through a boat like Tamarisk and try to add up the number of pumps, pulleys, switches, circuit boards, display panels, hoses, motors, antennas, hinges, ropes, propellers, impellers, cooling hoses, heating hoses, thermostats, bearings, batteries, bulbs, modems, solenoids, sensors, and relays, all of which must be working at any given time to sail the ship safely, your brain might start to melt as you realize the sheer quantity of things that somehow have to not break each and every day. Layer onto this the effects of high physical stresses on many components, plus the corrosive effects of saltwater and salty air (particularly on electronic parts), and you’ll soon discover that no matter how hard you work the thing will never, ever be fully functional. If you’re a perfectionist, or can’t stand the uncertainty of not knowing what will break next or where you’ll be when it happens, our advice is to choose a hobby other than long distance sailing.

Our three day round trip from Fort Lauderdale has been a good test for all the new work we’ve done, most of which passed the test. We’ve also taken our fishing skills to a new level now, with an ability to trawl three lines at once, which yields far more fish than we can possibly eat. Six months ago we caught our first fish off the Spanish coast, now we’re reeling in serious sport fish with relative ease. We’re no longer at risk of protein deficiency. Our brief stop in Key West on the way back up had great potential, but with the strict dinghy laws here in the US, and already one citation on our record, the Keys might as well not even exist as far as we’re concerned.

We’re about 24 hours away from Martin Harris’s boatyard, our home for the past two months and probably the next week. Our most important job for the next few days will be trying to convince Uncle Martin (not really our uncle but it feels that way) and Pete (his mechanic) to hop aboard Tamarisk for a couple years of sailing…. if we can achieve that, we’ll have made great strides towards eliminating the major challenges that lie ahead.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. If things had gone to plan, we’d be island hopping through the Belize islands right now slowly working our way towards the Panama Canal. But as so often is the case in the life of nomads, things happen, plans are questioned, then plans change, and eventually plans are abandoned all together. That has been the natural evolution of things for us since we left Marmaris in April. Florida was never on our itinerary in the first place, yet here we are effectively trapped for more than a month now. Our plans have changed so many times we’ve lost count, so today we take the next logical step of abandoning any solid plans in favor of winging it from now on.

The cause of our delay is not serious in the grand scheme of things. Nobody’s sick or injured, nobody got arrested (despite the Coast Guard’s brief annoyance with us), nobody got pregnant (as far as we know), the ship’s mast still stands in a vertical position. We’ve done well to avoid the major stumbling blocks that disrupt the circumnavigation hopes of many others. Our mistakes have been more mechanical in nature. We underestimated the difficulty of preparing a 20 year old boat for a circumnavigation, and we’ve consistently underestimated the time (and money) necessary to make the boat reliable and safe, which now brings us to be way behind our original schedule. Our current delay is caused by our new autopilot system being unable to steer the boat in any sort of heavy weather. We’re now repositioning the hydraulic arm to give it more leverage on the rudder and wiring up a system of electrical switches, relays, and massive cables to deliver more power to the hydraulic pump. These changes will be finished by the weekend (we hope), without them we’ll continue to get the dreaded “Rudder Response Failure” error flashing across our autopilot screens – that is the autopilot’s way of telling us “I don’t have the power to steer the boat, therefore I quit, the boat is going off course, take the wheel yourselves”.

The problem with this delay is that we’ve already arranged for a couple weeks of charity related work in Central America (about a week of sailing away from Florida) which begins on Monday. We’re doing research and due diligence there for Focusing Philanthropy and have a series of appointments set that we can’t reschedule. Our solution is to fly to Central America, complete our work there, then fly back to Tamarisk to continue the journey from Florida. Our passage through the Panama Canal will thus be delayed somewhat from our original plan, but very compatible with our new approach of abandoning so called “schedules” in favor of winging it.

The last time we spent three weeks in one place was back in Marmaris. We lived in a blissful delusion back then because we thought we’d simply spend a few weeks preparing the boat, then head off to go sailing around the world. That idea now seems quaint to us – everybody who’s done this before knows that sailing doesn’t work that way. Preparing a boat for an around the world trip takes an enormous amount of planning and hard work – the systems on these boats are far too numerous and complicated, and the marine conditions too harsh, to ever allow three weeks of prep work to be enough.

The systems we rely on are generally things you never think about while living on land. When you need electricity, you plug into the socket and like magic, the power is there – you don’t even need to know what a volt or an amp is. We don’t enjoy that luxury here on Tamarisk – every amp (a unit of power) we consume must be generated and stored somehow without plugging into anything…. our new generator is what makes this task manageable. At home you plug your computer into the wall and somehow the internet is always there and communication is instant. We need sophisticated satellite and radio equipment to get routine weather updates and manage communication tasks that would seem basic to people living on land. In the southern hemisphere oceans, where satellite communication is prohibitively expensive, we’ll use our new sideband radio to send email over radio signals at exactly the right frequency so they bounce off the atmosphere and arrive at a base station thousands of miles away. Our sails were 16 years old with brittle cloth, which put us in some potentially dangerous situations in the Mediterranean, and again on the Atlantic crossing. We’ve solved those problems using new sails, which should stay strong for another 5-10 years. Cheeky Little Bugger will be happy to know our mainsail (his favorite snack) is now in the dumpster just down the road from us. Then there’s the autopilot, which we successfully destroyed on the way across the Atlantic, and the anchor chain that was rusted almost to the point of breaking, and the bilge pumps, and the persistent problems with the rear toilet pump, and the spare parts for things that might break…. and you get the point.

After three weeks of intense work, we’re now back to doing sea trials where we try to put everything to the test out in the ocean. If anything is going to break on this boat, we want it to happen now where we can fix it easily. Our first sea trial off the Miami coast was on Saturday and we hope our final one will be tomorrow, then we’re off towards Central America as soon as we feel the boat is ready. The only thing holding us back at this point is the new autopilot hydraulic, which just refuses to cooperate – as much as we love Florida, we’re ready to get the hell out of here.

After a week and a half of epic island hopping in the Bahamas, we’re now sailing in American waters for the first and only time on our circumnavigation. “Sailing” isn’t really the proper word because the purpose of our detour to Fort Lauderdale is to do our last round of serious boat work before sailing off into the abyss. Once we leave Florida, the availability of services will go down, and the length of the passages will go up, so this is a logical place to get things finalized. In addition to replacing the sails, upgrading the generator, and replacing our destroyed autopilot, we’re also going through every system with a fine tooth comb, loading up on spare parts, and taking care of the deferred maintenance we’ve been putting off for the past couple of months. We know more about the inner workings of sailboats than we every cared to know, but attention to these details is critical to this type of sailing.

Luckily we’re in good hands here working with two true experts, Martin and Pete, who are not only fixing things with amazing efficiency, but also giving us a pretty good lesson in boat maintenance. This is all a big confidence booster which we’ve desperately needed ever since Tunger (“the Legend”) left us back in Greece.

Being back in the United States after nine months of fumbling around in other countries actually feels pretty refreshing. Things are clean, civilized, and easy. It’s easy to take these things for granted if you don’t step outside your comfort zone every now and again. But in life there is no such thing as a free lunch, and we’ve noticed a pretty direct relationship between how “civilized” a place is and how many rules it has. We may have gotten a little too accustomed to the lax regulations in southern Europe and the Caribbean where pretty much anything goes. We weren’t thinking about the gigantic Florida Penal Code when we went putting up the river in our dinghy to explore a little bit this afternoon. We definitely weren’t thinking about the law in Florida that requires even 2 horsepower dinghies to be registered…. a bizarre concept in every other country we’ve been to. We also weren’t thinking about the rules requiring us to have life vests and whistles aboard all motorized crafts. But Officer Waters of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s Marine Unit was thinking about all these things. You can imagine how stupid we felt as he went down his list, first asking for our registration docs, then for our life vests, then for our whistles. Luckily for us, Officer Waters was in a good mood this afternoon, so he let us go with a written warning and a deserved “shame on you”. And so that was our first and last American dinghy excursion… we’ll have to check Google Earth later to see what’s further up the river because we have a feeling the next citation won’t be of the warning variety.

We’ll be here for about another 10 days finishing things up on the boat before heading south towards more lawless / less civilized places, for better or worse. Our website is now back online after a labor intensive rebuilding process, so things on the blog will now return to normal… thanks for your patience!