January 11, 2000 -- Last Leg Miami Beach

This morning, Jay from Mindeymoya came over to visit for a little while. We hadn't seen him since he and his brother left Deltaville in early October! We spent some time chatting with him about how his cruise had been, how his brother was doing, and discussing the attitudes we have encountered as we moved south. Around 1430 GMT, we set out to make the run to Miami Beach. We wanted to time leaving from the dock so that we would not have to wait for the 17th St. Causeway bridge open. We arrived there with about 3 minutes to spare. We noted that the new bridge was only partially open, so we radioed the bridge to find out what was going on. They informed us that only one side of the bridge would be opening. I would have to thread us through the bridge with only half the width that I had the night before! That left us with maybe 3 feet on either side of the boat! We lined ourselves up, and while I piloted the boat, Mike went from side to side to make sure that the rigging would clear the bridge. I was ready at any time to drop the boat in reverse and punch the throttles! We made it through just fine. Well, we made it through almost just fine, I think I left part of my nerves at the bridge! As we cleared the bridge, an ocean liner was also leaving the commercial dock. We slowed down and let them go first, considering the laws of gross tonnage and all that. As we cleared the jetty, we were amazed at what a difference 24 hours makes. The seas were completely flat with less than 10 knots of wind the entire way to Government Cut. On the way though, we experienced something completely bizarre! We were moving along and found that we would veer off to starboard while the computer/GPS/autopilot thought that we were off course to port! This happened with two different GPSes, and two different computers. Somehow, though the image displayed on the computer was absolutely correct, the cross track error reporting was wrong. Ultimately, we settled to steer by compass. We wondered if it had something to do with the Cuban kid. I guess we will never know. At 1815, we tied up at the Miami Beach Marina. It was a beautiful, uneventful trip, vastly different from yesterday's!