"It's just not the same," a yacht broker friend complained as we drank coffee and soaked up the air conditioning in his waterfront office, "this is a powerboat town these days, they're driving sailors away. Heck, look out the window, do you see a mast?" His point was valid all I could see were the glossy topsides of monster motoryachts lining the waterways. Another friend, a marine surveyor and long time liveaboard sailor gulped the last of his coffee and griped, "If they keep building condos there won't be any liveaboard slips left. The real cruising sailors just don't come here anymore. The few sailors left in this town are power boaters in drag."
Is Ft. Lauderdale, long a vital waypoint for international sailors, really under siege from the burgeoning mega yacht industry and relentless real estate developers? Is the self appointed 'Venice of America' no longer calling out the welcome wagon for cruising sailors? A casual observation tends to confirm the notion. The many small apartment buildings with liveaboard slips and facilities that line the Las Olas Isles (the primary liveaboard area) are being flattened faster than Trent Lott's reputation to make way for expensive town homes and condos. Marinas reflect the shift toward larger, expensive yachts with minimum length charges. For example, one prominent marina has 55' minimum slip charge! (That means even if your boat is a 32' sloop you'll pay the same dockage rate as a 55' motoryacht) Just finding a liveaboard slip is a challenge, as I found out recently when I moved back aboard my 45' ketch, Fortuna.
Although Ft. Lauderdale has been my base for almost twenty years, I have spent the last six years ashore. And while I've sailed thousands of miles during these years, they were mostly offshore passages and I confess that I had lost touch with the Ft. Lauderdale cruising community. I was disturbed by my friend's dire assessment of the scene. I have fond memories of living aboard both my old Jeanneau sloop Epoch and Fortuna and I was anxious to share the experience with my kids now that they were old enough to remember it. I eventually tracked down a slip on Isle of Venice, a small marina with about a dozen boats nosed in behind the apartment complex. The marina offered a pool, pump out and shore side facilities and although it wasn't cheap, it felt terrific to be afloat again on a full time basis. Of course I was wary of my new neighbors and suspected the worst. These were the nouveau boaters I had been warned about.
Surprisingly there was only one powerboat on the dock and it was a funky, offshore fishing boat that had been converted to a long-range trawler. Before I could even learn the crew's names they set off on a voyage that they hoped would take them up Venezuela's wild Oronoco River. The Orinoco? Wow, not a bad destination for power boaters and I tried to conceal my envy as they powered away from the dock. Fortuna was sandwiched between a diminutive Hunter and a handsome Shannon 38. James and his Dutch wife Marieke were anxious for advice as they raced to finish refitting their Hunter 28 Pogo.
The young couple, who planned to sail to Panama and then out into the Pacific, had completely upgraded the boat. Their enthusiasm, idealism and complete inexperience stirred memories of a young man and his girl friend preparing for an audacious voyage around Cape Horn many years before. It would have been easy to ridicule their choice of boat and itinerary but instead I found myself admiring their gumption. Hell, dreams and the guts to attempt them is what cruising is all about. As we poured over the Pacific Pilot charts in Fortuna's cabin one night, I was beginning to suspect that things in Ft. Lauderdale were not as bad as they seemed. A few days later the whole dock turned out to see them off and I had a powerful feeling that we would meet up again, someplace far away.
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Dick and Linda aboard the Shannon 38 had sailed from San Francisco and another boat, a Morgan 46, had just arrived from the Caribbean. An interesting 56' Mikado, a rugged French built ketch caught my eye, and I swear it had nothing to do with the skipper's lovely daughters. The French skipper and his Brazilian wife had cruised extensively in the Southern Atlantic. Their daughters were worldly, spoke several languages and were not at all happy at the prospect of selling their boat and returning to France. They loved cruising and, believe or not, they liked Ft. Lauderdale.
Several boats on the dock were for sale. Despite its many other failings, Ft. Lauderdale is the still home to more brokers per square inch than any place on earth. Of course that can be construed as a failing as well but it is a good place to buy and sell cruising boats. Low import duties allow people from all over the world to sell their boats in the United States and more often than not they end up in Ft. Lauderdale. A couple from South Africa took up temporary residence in the slip next to Fortuna just long enough to interview several brokers. After listing their handsome aluminum cutter, they moved the boat to a non-liveaboard slip and flew back to Cape Town. By the way, they had just spent two years cruising the Atlantic and Ft. Lauderdale had been their final destination from the get go.
Soon afterward an old friend, Dennis, pulled his classic but tired 53' 1927 wooden Abeking and Rasmussen sloop along side. Dennis has lived aboard in Ft. Lauderdale for twenty years and although he was flirting with moving ashore he just couldn't make the step. Sitting in the cockpit, drinking wine and admiring the diverse boats along the canal, Dennis admitted that the liveaboard scene had changed. "But hey, what hasn't changed. I still wouldn't trade this boat for a concrete apartment, no sir." Of course he did admit that he might trade it for a low maintenance fiberglass boat instead.
One morning, not long ago, a spotless and impressive Amel Super Maramu, Harmonie, pulled into the marina a few docks away. The middle-aged couple aboard surprised me by expertly backing the boat into the slip without fuss or fanfare. Still, I suspected that they were new to cruising, the boat was immaculate and the crew didn't have that old salt look. I leaped to all sorts of conclusions. I figured that they had recently retired, visited my friend Joel Potter, the Ft. Lauderdale based Amel dealer, and like so many people these days were planning a Caribbean sabbatical before returning to their terrestrial lives.
I eventually met Ralph and Ann when they invited us to a potluck dinner on the dock. The girls had homework that night, so we declined but a few days later Ralph and I chatted briefly on the dock. I mentioned that their boat looked great and asked if it was new. He laughed, "no, she's not new, she has about 60,000 miles on her." "What," I said, wondering if I had misunderstood him. "That's right, about 60,000," he said as he climbed aboard, "we've been around the world and done other sailing as well."
Sitting in Harmonie's comfortable and protected cockpit Ralph told me their story. They ordered the boat in 1995 and took delivery at the factory in La Rochelle the following summer. They then blasted across the Atlantic, sailing direct to Bermuda and then on to Annapolis. "The boat lived on the Bay for two years while we still worked in Cleveland, we were Southwest Air's best customers as commuted almost every weekend."
After retiring in May 1998, they sailed north to Maine and then on across the Atlantic. "We had to dip south to avoid ice," Ralph explained nonchalantly, "and sailed back to La Rochelle." They had decided to join Jimmy Cornell's around-the-world Millennium Rally and wanted the Amel factory to tweak the boat for the voyage. They sailed north to London to participate in the Rally's send off. Theirs was not the garden variety, milk run circumnavigation. With just a handful of other boats, they opted to sail to the Pacific via Cape Horn, the Beagle Channel and the canals of Patagonia. "The Falkland Islands were one of our favorite stops." The eventually joined the rest of the fleet in the Pacific and visited the Tuamotus, French Polynesia, Tonga and Fiji. After crossing the Indian Ocean they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and visited South Africa. "Surprisingly, South Africa was also one of the highlights of the trip." They actually completed their circumnavigation when they reached Brazil but continued on and finished the rally.
"So," I said, still somewhat dazed and embarrassed at how colossally I had misjudged these accomplished and capable sailors, "what's next."? "Oh I don't know," Ralph said with a bemused smile, "I think we'll do the Bahamas." Ralph Nehrig and Ann Harsh have no time frame and no need to impress others with tales of daring do, they just love to sail and have a powerful curiosity to explore new lands. They are just the kind of people you might run into at a small marina in Ft. Lauderdale. This town's not so bad after all.
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