Lake Boca is a large rectangle of water cut into the west side of the beach strip of Boca Raton, from the Boca Inlet north for about  .4 miles, along the east side of the ICW, .2 miles wide. The center of it is very shallow with only the edges navigable for keel boats. Anchorage for sailboats is in the NE corner. Access to land is in a park with a boat ramp and dinghy dock on the west side of the ICW, just south of the Palmetto Park Boulevard Bridge, north of the lake (less than half a mile away). We will have to request an opening of that bridge when we leave to head north.

Craig had a better idea about where to go ashore, because the tide runs fast under the bridge and big boats go too fast and make wakes: his boat, Sangaris, pictured above, is docked in a canal at the back yard of a private home about a mile further north. He picked us up there and we got to see Sangaris again, after all her European adventures.

Ive been saying that when I get too old to sail ILENE, a radio controlled sailing boat on a lake may be in my future. Well Kathy had to work, Lene did her phone work from Kathy and Craigs house, and Craig took me to another gated community a bit further north called Kings Point, which has a lake in which his club races such boats. Beauties, one meter long, high aspect ratio,with 3/4 of the weight in the keel. The control box is worn on a strap around ones neck and the right thumb controls the rudder by pushing its joy stick left of right, while the left thumb controls both sails with back to pull them closer hauled and forward letting them fly for the downwind legs of the course. Below is Craig, demonstrating and Erwin, also a Past Commodore of the Harlem and racer, to the right.

All I can say is that it is a lot harder than it looks and I lost every race; actually I did not finish them. When aboard a boat you can easily see if your bow is pointed to the right or left of a buoy; you feel the tension of the water on the rudder; you can see how close to the wind you are. But offset by 50 to 100 yards and at a strange angle, these critical facts are not readily apparent at least not yet, to me. And rudder control is maintained by constant pressure of perhaps a half inch on the "tiller". But these things can be learned and the fifteen guys had a good camraderie going. Kathy is one of the guys and quite competitive when she is not working. I raced her boat, number 3. Erwin brought some beer for the "after". We plan to see Erwin again before heading north.

And in the evening we had dinner with not just Craig and Kathy, but also Mike and Janet. The latter have a Florida home and we will see them again at their home in St. Michaels, off the Chesapeake on Marylands Eastern Shore, on our way home. I forget to take their picture but they are pictured from when we visited them in the Chesapeake in 2012 if you want to take a look. A nice Greek restaurant.

We rented a car for one day for trips to cousin Naomi to pick up a late arriving bundle of mail from home, the pet food store, Publix, the automotive store for things for the dink, the post office, the bank and the beach.

On our last day we toured around Mizener Village, which is a ritzy shopping mall. I got some new shorts because none of my old ones are unstained. We had lunch out and saw The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which celebrates India and aging. Good but not as good as the first movie. The theater is called Ipic and does not really want to be in the movie business. Seats are very large and comfortable and $14 if you want to sit in the first two rows, or $24 if you want even more luxurious seats with free use of a pillow and blanket and free popcorn. And Ipic has a full service restaurant and bar that you can patronize before or after and provides delivery of food and drink to your seat during the movie. And no reduced rate for matinees or for seniors.  The staff said it is a "good place to impress your date on a special occasion". The film is apparently just a gimmick to get folks to come in and spend money on the "entertainment experience package". This hustle offends me and I hope it fails, though we were the only two in the sixteen "cheap" seats while perhaps ten people sat behind us. We have had nice warm dry calm weather while in Boca. Next stop: Palm Beach.

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Today we traversed the Great Dismal Swamp, one of three inland routes between Norfolk and North Carolina. This is the westernmost route and most of it is a very straight and narrow (about 50 feetwide) canal

that is not very deep (about eight to ten feet).A new route to a new port.
One thing about it is easier. Normally I piece together many legs of a days journey, measure the length of each lag and add them together. But in the ditch, the charts show the mileposts from mile zero in Norfolk to over a thousand miles later in Florida. But these are in statute (land) miles and so one must take only 85 percent of them to get the nautical miles. Today we started half mile north of mile zero and Elizabeth City is at mile 51, leading to 43.8 nautical miles. And describing "legs" would have been difficult after we exited the canal proper into the Pasquatank River, which is nothing if not sinuous. Oops, upside down. Eliz. City is the black boxes (streets) toward the upper right, the old down town.

But this path is more challenging because there is no sailing allowed, and the road is so narrow, requiring constant attention as when driving a car. Also there are hazards above and below. Below are "deadheads" -- water soaked tree stumps that lay on the bottom and give us a thump when we hit them. We know they are there and that we will take a few hits (four today) but unlike coral heads in the Bahamas, they do not sink your boat. The peril above is tree branches that overhang the canal and get whacked by our mast (about three times today).

Here is some of the flora we harvested with our mast and shrouds, showing also the straightness of the canal, the diagonal to the lower left corner.

It was a long day, but warm at last and sunny, and windless. Normally we dont like windless days but no sailing is possible in the canals so no big loss. We got underway at seven in morning mist, and headed up the Elizabeth River to make it to the first lock, at the northern end of the swamp, at its 8:30 scheduled opening.


Here we are, all five boats, locked up together.

The lock business and the associated bridge took an hour and we timed the next 22 miles at five knots to arrive at the second and last lock for its 1:30 opening, and arrived in Elizabeth City at about 5 pm. A long, slow, ten hour day.
Yesterday we crossed paths with a mammoth container ship; today a more modest craft.

Eliz. City calls itself "The Harbor of Hospitality" and this billboard

is 50 feet from our slip. It proves this true by providing seventeen free guest docks, and we took one. In the morning, a man and his daughter offered us a ride, three miles, to the supermarket and Judy and Rich, who work for the Coast Guard, gave us a lift back. Yep, a friendly town. We are bow in. On the way in we looped our starboard stern line over a piling and  then ran forward to hand a bow line to one of the friendly volunteers who secured it to a piling near land on the port side. Easy, in the absence of wind. The other two lines loop around pilings off the other two corners and I added a spring line to keep us from crashing into the street ahead of us if there was a surge (but no surge tonight) and we were totally secure. Black line is starboard aft line and white is spring line.

The last step was loosening the starboard forward tether and tightening the port one to bring our bow above the short stubby dock so that we could climb down from the bowsprit onto it.

On arrival we took free shoreside showers

and had dinner ashore before returning for the evening. There was a very easy camraderie among the crews of the boats here, all enthusiastic about their similar but individual adventures. Next to us, separated only by our biggest fender, is a beautiful Shannon, "Whisper", whose three very young, very blond children came aboard to play with our crew. Witty was not really a happy camper in this, but he played along well enough. I missed the photo op.

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In my most recent post I described a traffic jam at the main bridge across the ICW in Palm Beach, Flagler Memorial, and the massing of huge mega yachts there, possibly because of the boat show.  In Stuart the local newspaper cameraman did what I could not do because I was too busy trying to not hit any other boat! The paper also said that there was $1.2 billion of boats for sale at the show.

Stuart is a six and a half mile detour, west of the ICW. En route to Stuart there were eleven bridges but only four, the first four, were on schedules and we made them all without delay after taking in the dock lines at 8:05 to make the 8:15 opening of the first. We had a bit of wind from our port side as we headed north and flew the small jib most of the way making good speed with its assist, while motoring all the way. But the wind was mostly a lot of puffs rather than a steady breeze and such puffs change the apparent wind direction so I was trimming very frequently. Here is the light at the Jupiter Inlet,

The wind grew stronger as we entered the St. Lucie River that leads west to Stuart. The river, via a canal (with fixed bridges less than 60 feet high), is the outlet from Lake Okeechobee to the Atlantic. The lake is about 20 miles in diameter but a third is way too shallow and the rest varies from six to twelve feet in depth. We had planned to go outside through the Atlantic from North Palm Beach through the Lake Worth inlet to the Fort Pierce Inlet. Fort Pierce is our next stop after Stuart. But a barge sank in that inlet and salvage operations made it impassable to boats with greater than five foot draft. Our friends, Bob and Brenda, on s/v Pandora made it through with a 510" draft, but just barely and it was a harrowing experience. Google: Sailpandora, their blog, for an account of that episode.

So we are here in Stuart for a few days waiting progress of the salvage and the passing of bad weather. Speaking of which, the wind really came up -- up to 30 knots -- as we went up the rather poorly marked channel in the wide but shallow St. Lucie River to Stuart. We had furled the small jib by then. After the first four bridges of the ICW, the other seven consisted of: four that open on request, two high bridges and one a RR bridge which is open except when a train comes.  But the last, was shown by my sources as being on a half hourly schedule so we slowed a bit, planning to make the 1:30 opening. When I called in advance to let the tender know we would be requesting that opening, he replied "Come right up and Ill give you an opening!" And it was a good thing too. We did not tarry and made fast on a mooring (only $25 per night in season) with two of our lines run through its eye and back, only about ten minutes before the heavens opened up with torrential rain that made my deck washing of the day before a complete waste of time, and strong gusty winds too. We still had our instruments on and I saw a gust of 49 knots (57 mph)!  Sure glad we had made it onto the mooring before that.

We used the marinas shuttle bus to provision at Publix and used their free bicycles to tour the town, visit the bank, etc. It is a small town at its historic center, which was originally located on the north side of the St. Lucie and called Pottsdam. But in the 1890s it was moved to the south bank and non-German settlers didnt like the name so they called it Stuart after an early landowner by that name, son of a prominent attorney in New York. The town is located where the St. Lucie becomes very narrow because of peninsulas sticking out from both the north and south shores. Three bridges cross it here, at its narrowest -- the last three of the eleven we crossed under. In the photo below, from right to left, the newest high one carries Route 1, without interruption for openings, followed by the RR bridge and the bascule bridge for the Dixie highway which as noted above, opens on request, both of which are "up".

We almost bought a condo unit here, as an investment -- just before the Florida real estate bubble burst. It is called the Harborage Condominium and Yacht Club, on the north shore, opposite the town, just east of the bridges. We got lucky and dodged a bullet: they couldnt build then and we got our money back!

There is a long boardwalk just off the waters edge, perhaps half a mile long with nice views of the river and this guy, you see his shadow, who is nonplused by humans or the roaring of the railroad. Amazing in this litigious age, there is only a toe rail to keep people from falling off the boardwalk.

The battle to stop All Aboard Florida is raging hotly in the newspapers here. Entrepreneurs want to run about twenty high speed passenger trains per day betweeen Miami and Orlando (in addition to the many long freight trains) on the existing tracks of the Florida East Coast RR. But the noise of the trains themselves and their whistles and the additional obstructions to boaters at bridges -- and to auto drivers, seem to have galvanized a fervid opposition in every town the tracks pass through, including Stuart.

The other current hot local issue is whether the State or municipalities should enact laws effectively preventing boaters from anchoring in the State of Florida by forbidding anchoring within "X" feet of private property. When you measure "X" feet from both shorelines, there is precious little water, if any, where one could anchor.

The first general store in Stuart was put out of business by the big box store of that era, A and P. It became a grain and feed store until the 1960s and is now the historical museum, free admission. They basically invited the townspeople to donate "stuff" and curated it into a museum about Stuart and its county. The same railroad that is now controversial is what made the state. In the 1890s pineapple was king here, shipped north via the Railroad. In the middle of the 20th century Stuart was the cut flower capital of America. Now it is tourists that fuel the economy, but they dont come by train.

We had lunch at the Marinas restaurant one day and breakfast at Marias in town, another. When my nephew, David, a southern boy, was sailing with me in Long Island Sound those many years ago and we got to Northport, he asked for biscuits and gravy. Well you cant get that in Northport but at Marias they were delicious.

We have had some weather here, thunderstorms with plenty of rain, but they came when we were aboard, safe and dry - though bailing out the dink becomes a small chore. The weatherman is telling us to stay one more day here.

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Shanghai departed after the fog lifted and CJ reported that they made it to a mooring in South Cove at old Saybrook in the Connecticut River.
True North rested up after Bruce felt ill from the dinner the night before. The folks on Blast continued exploring this island via automobile and planned dinner at Deadeye Dicks.

We detached and stowed Ohanas dink engine and then hauled the dink aboard and discovered the cause of the leak when water that had entered the inflatables starboard tube flowed out through a separation between that tube and the blue conical cap at its aft end. Drained of air and water it is rolled and stowed with the outboard.

Ohana and ILENE then took advantage of our rafted condition to take a 4.5 hour day sail past the southern coast of the island aboard Ohana, leaving ILENE on the mooring. We experienced moderate winds under clear sunny skies accompanied by big ocean rollers from yesterdays winds. We saw Mohegan Bluff and the SE lighthouse from the sea, from a distance.

Our fastest speed was sailing back into the Great Salt Pond.

After our return, Rolo, Laura and Christain headed off to swim and dinner while Lene, Bennett and Roger dined at Elis, a small gem of a restaurant one block back from the main road through the Old Town. Elis is a fine dining experience that Ken and Camille, who plan incidentally to meet up with us in Stonington CT, tomorrow,  introduced us to a few years ago. This was my third time there and we have never been disappointed. It opens at six, takes no reservations, does not advertise and is always full. I got there early and  waited on line while Lene and Bennett shopped for souvenirs. Im not going to describe the menu but it is imaginative and if we paid a lot more for this food in Manhattan we would not be dissatisfied. And the walk back to the Boat Basin helped the food settle.

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Interview with John Simpson 

John Simpson has been a boat designer for 45 years. I had a chance meet him at a Metal Boat Festival a few years ago. Now every time I go to one I look forward to hearing him speak. He has a vast knowledge of boat design and is always willing to share that knowledge.

John, you have been a long time member of the Metal Boat Society and contributor to the Metal Boat Quarterly, thank you for your years of support.

DB: When did you get into boating?

JS: My first boating experience was at 4 years old with my dad in an open 16’ rental boat with inboard engine.

When did you realize you wanted to design boats for a living and how did you become a yacht/marine designer?

Even though I had been sketching out boats for several years and had been boating since 10, it was during a university summer job maintaining 3 naval utility vessels (75’, 48’, and 36’) that design and construction got into my blood stream. My first step was to interview several naval architects to get a feel for the business. All were very helpful and one suggested the best path was to marry a rich woman (I didn’t). I did another summer job in a boatyard leading to a 4 year marine design/drafting and engineering apprenticeship at a shipyard where we built several ferries & barges and at that time, the world’s largest semi-submersible oil rig. At completion I had jobs with several naval architects designing yachts, fish boats, dredges, barges, etc. Around 1972 (incorporated 1974) I started doing my own design work and topping up wages working with a boat builder.

Could you tell us about your first commission?

The ‘first’was a 70’ steel schooner shortly followed by a 33’ fuel efficient motor cruiser(s). Both are still in service

Since that first commission, how many boats have you designed?

By my records about 110 – sail, power, commercial ranging in size from 17’ to 80’ in steel, aluminum, and FRP. Some designs evolved from originals so the total number is higher.

This may not sound like a lot of designs over 40+years  but keep in mind that some designs can be complicated and if they need to meet Government Regulations, must be diligently monitored throughout construction… this and outside consult work absorbs time.

Not only do you have experience designing, but you have experience in building. Could you tell us about your boat building experience? 

From a bare hull: a 9’ sailing dinghy & a 22’ sail boat. Plus, 2 years with one builder followed by 3 years doing custom power boats 30’ – 50’, the latter as foreman, estimator, assistant manager, & designer.   

What lessons  have you learned from building that have helped with your design work?

Try not to design what one boss called an “Architect’s Dream”… ie: impossible to build. It was obvious that the designer had no boatbuilding experience and little boating experience.   I was just getting into my own design business and my ‘boss’ gave me some good advice:

 Never forget that one day:

(a)You may have to build one of your designs.

(b) You may have to use one of your designs.

I have done both on several occasions

As a designer you are well versed in not only yachts, but commercial vessels. I hope our readers will go to your website  http://www.simpsonmarinedesign.com and take a look at your portfolio. What are some of the challenges with commercial designs that are not present in recreational design?

The challenges are very similar but commercial boat (fishboats, etc) owners often push the limits, sometimes at great risk: Overloading, improper loading, or sailing into harm’s way, is not uncommon.  Not all boats are the same.

What are some of the challenges with recreational and cruising designs?

Very similar to commercial vessels: Different boats (designs) have different characteristics and each must be used within its limits. Putting a hot-tub on the housetop of a pontoon type house boat might be fine but on a motor cruiser, it may not be an option.

Any tips for the amateur builder looking at designs and wanting to build their own

boat?

(a)Choose the right design by getting some boating experience.

(b) Work up a realistic schedule – with particular attention to time. Unfortunate as it is, I have seen many cases where the ‘boat project’ outlived the builder.

(c)  Don’t underestimate the price. If your dream is a $500,000 yacht, you are not going to build it for $150,000. (not to the same standards at least.) 

(d)  Concentrate on the boat and not the parts. Building your own parts (windows, port lights, engine conversion, etc.) could be a poor investment of time: That 10 year project might stretch into 20…. And never get completed!

(e)  Use marine parts & equipment – it is designed for that purpose. Boats equipped with automotive and/or domestic equipment may put you at risk. 

(f)    Get the ‘other half’ involved- being a “boat widow” is not fun.

(g)  Pay now…or .. Pay later. Doing it properly the first time is a good investment. Corrections later can sometimes be very costly…. If they can be done at all.

Any tips for anyone wanting to modify a design of an existing boat?

Be very cautious: small changes can sometimes have huge consequences. Work with a naval architect/designer (preferably the one who did your boat)

Could you tell us about your consulting services you offer?

This covers wide variety of services ranging from performance estimates, propeller sizing, stability evaluation, to a design check (a review of the design with a second opinion).

Anything on the drawing board you want to tell us about?

A small project for a client that did a circumnavigation in one of my designs. They want to go from ‘offshore’ to ‘inshore’.  It is a 30’, easily transportable sailing punt to be used for exploring various inland waters in North America & beyond.

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