From our house in Mexico it takes 1-1/2 days of travel to get to Ft. Lauderdale: 4-1/2 hours of driving to get to the border, then a five-hour flight plus two hours' time difference to arrive at our destination. Monday night we checked in at the Best Western Pelican Beach Resort, on the beach in Hotel Row. This is not John McDonald's Ft Lauderdale; it's the one he railed against in all his Travis McGee novels. Highrise condos and hotels line the shore in imitation of Miami, which is only 25 miles south of here. You can see its lights from the beach. Inland for miles are row upon row of strip malls and big-name stores. I looked for the funky docks where Travis would have kept his houseboat, and decided they must be in another part of town.
The Capt stands in the shade of a neighboring freight hauler and admires the exterior hull of his new boat. From here, it looks pretty good.
Then yesterday, appropriately Halloween, we went to examine the boat. We received a personal guided tour from the previous owner's wife, an engaging Aussie with long silvered hair pulled back in a ponytail and a big warm smile. We followed her on a 45-minute drive to the storage area where the Morgan sits on jacks, surrounded by a couple of powerboats and a number of freight trucks. From outside she looked fairly sound, and her gelcoat gleamed in the sunlight as we stood looking up at her. Too bad it's the wrong color for the tropics, where a dark hull would only make a sweltering cabin hotter. We climbed the wooden ladder to gain entrance to the cockpit and...Boo!
I swallowed hard, kept my mouth shut and concentrated on taking pictures. I'll let the shots tell the story, as a detailed description is just too disheartening. I like to photograph beautiful things, but I've posted these in the interest of recording history. Someday, when the transformation has taken place (she wrote optimistically), we'll have an eye-popping before-and-after comparison.
The cockpit is somewhat narrower than the one on our 33-footer.
The galley, the 1st Mate's domain. In the foreground is a box that once housed a top-loading fridge and freezer. A bulkhead behind it separated it from the master cabin head, complete with small bathtub (which is still there, and in good shape!)
In the former engine room, the Capt found evidence of a fire, which may have occurred during the sinking.
We learned a few things that gave us a better picture of the boat's murky history. Her original name was Scarlet Lady. The previous owners found her at Marathon Key and brought her up by truck, the husband full of inspired dreams for her rehabilitation that the wife never quite shared, though she kept her misgivings to herself. They bought her from a woman whose husband had abandoned her and the boat, after they limped into Marathon with everything from engine trouble to sail trouble. Suffering from lupus, unable to tolerate the sun, the woman was desperate to sell the boat and escape. And, added our Aussie friend, whoever stepped the mast failed to put a penny under it. Bad luck! No wonder the Scarlet Lady, from her launching in 1987, has come undone.
While we were surveying our "new" boat, the previous owner was out in the Atlantic doing sea trials on his new craft, a 46.5 Morgan ketch named Saturday's Child. In the evening we got together to compare notes over a seafood dinner at a restaurant on one of the canals, founded in 1952 and still delightfully authentic and funky. Travis McGee would have felt right at home. The Skipper and I shared a combo platter piled high with three varieties of crablegs, followed by key lime pie.
We swapped stories about how we got into sailing, our previous boats and our most memorable adventures at sea, as cruisers do when they get together. We talked about all the places we want to explore: they envision heading back to Australia, where they met, at some point, and we're dreaming of the Caribbean and possibly Europe.
"Well, Bliss, what did you think of your new boat?" they asked me. I answered truthfully that it was the scariest Halloween I'd ever experienced. Not so much the boat itself, which I expected to be an ugly shock, but the prospect of getting her to Mexico and getting her back into seaworthy condition.
Back at the hotel, the four of us walked down to the beach where I finally dipped my toes in the Atlantic for the first time, the best part of the trip so far.
From our 9th floor hotel room we can see the Intracoastal Waterway, which goes all the way to Brownsville, TX according to Wikipedia
0 comments:
Post a Comment