1/19/15
Dinner Key/Coconut Grove FL
Posted by Bill

Did some exploring today around Coconut Grove, mostly scoping out grocery stores, Home Depot, and Liquor Stores. It is only a 20-30 minute walk to really good options for all of those, and there is a Fresh Market only 2 blocks away. The marina here is huge, 582 slips and 225 mooring buoys, and it is pretty much full. The mooring field is exposed to the wind and waves except to the west, so it gets really bumpy in here and dinghy rides can be pretty wet. It is really bumpy when boats come in and out of the channel next to the mooring field, throwing a wake. The facilities are dated and in need of a refresh, but they are working on new ones, so that should be remedied. We’ll try to get some pictures in the next couple of days.

In preparation for our cruise, I did EXTENSIVE research about what it would be like, where we should go, and how to prepare. A big part of that research was searching and reading blogs of other cruisers, and one of the blogs that was most helpful was from a boat named Kintala. The owners, Tim and Deb, lived in the mid-west and bought a boat to retire on, moved it to the east coast and started the cruising thing. They went down the ICW and over to the Bahamas and back. They wrote about the whole process from start to finish, and in a way that really helped us understand what we were getting into. In addition, both are very good writers and do an excellent job of capturing the emotions, both good and bad, and tell it like it is. Over the last year I have reached out to them via email and phone, and they have been very helpful. There are only a couple of other blogs that we had interactions with like this, and when you read their stories you really feel like you know them…kinda like you know your friends. Knowing they were in Dinner Key, I made contact and told them we were coming and would like to meet them in person. As fate would have it, the mooring that we were assigned was right beside them! They invited us for sundowners yesterday and we had a great time talking to them and getting to know them in person. Looking forward to more of that.

Now to the battery saga. As you may recall from previous posts, we are not getting the full amp hours out of our batteries. There are 3 “house” batteries rated at 105 amp hours for a total of 315, and after 60 amp hours of use, the resting voltage of the batteries is 11.5 volts. We charge them back to trickle charge rates twice a day which takes about 2.5 hours in the morning and again in the evening. After much reading and testing, I think we have some bad batteries. We replaced them in October of last year so that we wouldn’t have to be dealing with these kinds of things…hah! I need shore power to hook up my smart charger to each individually and see if it can fix them. If not…we’ll probably have to rent a car and return them to the nearest Walmart. We had this same brand of battery for 4 years prior and never had a problem. So now we have to figure out where the best place to pay for a slip is, here in the land of $3-7 per foot per night…ugh!