« Pee Water | Main | Spring Break »
March 11, 2006
Spring Break & W.
Spring Break has returned to Fort Lauderdale.
While the local politicians tried everything to drive the kids away, they are back in droves. The police are everywhere. The “no beer or alcohol allowed on the beach” signs are ignored. The weary partiers from last night, who didn’t quite make it home and chose instead to sleep it off on the beach, strike up the next round of partying with a little hair-of-the-dog at 9am as we run past.
Having finished the New York Times (Maureen Dowd’s column in today’s New York Times is a bang-on summary of the macerations of George W. Bush - click HERE if you are an online subscriber) and the Wall Street Journal, we decided to go for a walk on the beach. I should say, a putter. You could barely move. Wall-to-wall bodies. And, I am finally prepared to accept, my t-shirt was not coming off near these svelt, highly buffed, chiseled bodies. I clearly am less comfortable with my body than the guy that runs the beach in his dental floss thong. I mean, barely covers a thing. Truly, the quintessential banana hammock. And horror of horrors, he don’t got the body for it.
The strong cold fronts that rolled through every 4 or 5 days and chilled things off (we had frost!) have slowed right down and moved north as spring arrives. We need one of these strong fronts for our upcoming departure for the Virgin Islands.
The Virgins Islands are 8 to 10 days of sailing from here. We will sail straight out through the Northwest Providence Channel that separates Grand Bahama Islands from the rest of the Bahamas, and head due east for 65 degrees (directly north of the Virgin Islands). We will then turn south.
The reason for this plan is quite simple – sailboats don’t sail into the wind. And prevailing winds here are southeast to east – our destination is directly into the prevailing winds. So we wait for the front side of a cold front. The winds will be in the south, then shift clockwise to the west, then north. Once it passes, the wind will shift back to the east/southeast again. So, with some luck, we will sail due east with a south, then west, then north wind, reach 65 degrees, and turn south when the wind shifts to the east.
The plan, called I65 by American sailors, is tried and true. It adds 200 miles to the journey, but it beats motoring for days into a headwind.
Now, we just need a nice strong cold front. Meanwhile, we run. We walk. We read. We visit friends. We wait.
Posted by dave at March 11, 2006 06:22 PM