Florida’s Gold Coast

Our next destination was Key Biscayne. 

We had made a friend on the Loop on the river system 18 months prior.  He had been traveling with us on his boat. 

Unfortunately his wife had just been diagnosed with a serious illness and she had to leave the boat before we met him to get treatment. 

He was moving his boat by himself to get back home. 

Home for him was Key Biscayne in Florida south of Miami. 

He had a couple thousand miles to go, and so we traveled with him for a little while.

But his urgency to move pushed him ahead of us. We said goodbye, but kept in contact with him.

Eventually we were relieved to hear that his wife got through her treatments successfully and was healthy again… an awesome outcome.  

He asked us to reach out to him when we were in the area of Key Biscayne as he was a member of a yacht club there. 

We did. 

We weren’t disappointed. 

Key Biscayne is a special place. It has good stores, great restaurants, and even better bike lanes. 

It’s not a big island, but there are a lot of people with means who live there, which makes it a great stop on the Loop. 

We were finally able to meet our friend’s wife. She was a joy to get to know.

We reaffirmed our friendship, even after an eighteen month absence. We had dinner together, got caught up, and they gave us some ideas of things to do.

The next day we provisioned and went out to see the Key Biscayne Lighthouse.  We took took time to enjoy the island a little bit. 

One of the cool things about Key Biscayne Yacht Club were that huge tarpon would hang by our boat. These fish were sometimes 6 to 7 feet long. 

If you don’t know what a tarpon is, it is a very famous game fish that people love to catch. They usually catch and release them as trophy fish are not kept that much anymore for the taxidermist. 

Tarpon are not at the top of the food chain, but they can see it from there.

That evening we met our friends for drinks at the yacht club and met a few other people there. 

I was pleased to find one gentleman who went to a high school that was a competitor of my old high school. 

He graduated a year behind me, and it was fun to get to know him and find out our mutual acquaintances; we had a couple. 

Our friends had a lot of experience going to the Bahamas, so we gleaned some local knowledge from them.  

It was a very enjoyable evening. 

The next morning, Libbie and I cast off and headed north. 

It was on Wednesday morning and we wanted to get through the Gold Coast of Florida by Friday afternoon. 

The Gold Coast of Florida is famous for people doing silly and dangerous things with boats on the weekend. 

If you ever have seen the social media websites about Haulover Inlet, you would understand.  Here’s a YouTube Channel to help you understand:

We wanted no part of that. 

We motored through Miami, Palm Beach and other notable destinations.

There were some beautiful homes along the ICW in this area. They don’t calling the Gold Coast for no reason.

We traveled 4 to 5 hours a day and anchored at night the next three days.

We arrived in Stuart, Florida, our destination for the weekend.

We anchored out two nights.

After the first night, we hopped in the dinghy and made the two mile run to a free dock at Stuart.  We did some shopping, went to the art festival that was on that Saturday and had a nice lunch. We returned to Selkie. 

We then made reservations for a slip for Super Bowl Sunday at one of the local marinas. 

That marina had advertised a Super Bowl party with free food, beer and wine, and of course we couldn’t pass that up.  

Plus it had free laundry facilities. 

Given the price we paid for the marina slip, we took full advantage of all of its amenities. 

We attended their Superbowl Party. 

The best team won, which happened to be the team we were rooting for. 

We met some fellow Michiganders there.  They were on a sailboat.  We exchanged sailing stories and had a great time. 

The next day we wanted to make some progress towards our next destination.

We left the marina and went two hours to an anchorage that we had picked out. The anchorage was close to one of the barrier islands that formed the lower part of the Indian River. 

We anchored there for two nights. 

One of the reasons we wanted to go to this anchorage was that it had access to a small county park which had a great beach.  We took advantage of the beach access.   

To the north of our anchorage sat a nuclear power plant. 

It was several miles away, but it was close enough that I could see the steam turbine deck with binoculars. 

My first job out of college was working as a steam turbine engineer in power plants like this. 

It brought back a lot of memories. It was cool for me to see that.

When we weren’t going to the beach, I was helping Libbie as she completed the bright work updates to Selkie. 

Brightwork is a term used for the really beautiful wood finishes you see on boats. Well maintained bright work is a thing to behold. 

Selkie has some beautiful teak rails, but they had needed some refreshing.  Ultraviolet light is tough on varnish.  It required stripping of some of the varnish and reapplying it. 

To reapply varnish on bare wood, one must start off with a small part of mineral spirits mixed into the varnish to get it to soak into the wood.  One gradually builds it up from there.

Libbie did eight coats in total on the bare wood rail and added two coats to the rails that we had done previous year. 

It was a lot of work but the finished product looks outstanding. It also saved us more than a few thousand dollars for her to do that. 

After two days, we departed our anchorage and headed north. We had friends to see that we had not seen in a while and we’re looking forward to being with them. 

More to come.