Saturday, September 20th, around noon.

Antony and I slipped the lines in Fort Lauderdale after wrapping up the last loose end of the lithium installation. The final issue—a wiring harness that didn’t behave the way it should—was sorted out by Johnathan from Maz Ocean earlier this morning. It felt good to close the loop on that. I plan to do a deep dive into the lithium battery install in separate post.

We eased out of the slip around 11:30am today, made a short stop at the fuel dock to top off on diesel, then turned east through the inlet. Once clear, we settled on a course toward Bimini.

At the moment, we’re motor-sailing. The wind hasn’t quite filled in enough to carry us on canvas alone, but with the sails up we’re getting a bit of lift and steadying the motion. Seas are mild—around two feet, well-spaced—and the ride is comfortable. The kind of conditions that let you find a rhythm quickly.

We’re expecting to reach Bimini around 8:30 this evening. From there, the plan is to continue on—sailing overnight tonight and again tomorrow night—working our way south toward Georgetown in the Exumas.

It’s especially good to have my son, Antony, aboard for this passage. Sharing the watches, the conversations, and the quiet stretches in between. Some passages are about miles covered. Others are about who’s with you while you cover them.

Right now, the sea feels cooperative.
The boat feels ready.
And we’re pointed where we mean to go.

By the time this goes out, I’ll be underway. Harbortown will already be slipping astern, becoming one of those places you measure in what got done rather than how long you stayed.

I won’t claim Harbortown is unique in the world. There are probably other marinas like this—maybe better ones—and I hope I find them. But it is the first place I’ve encountered where nearly everything I needed was close at hand, and now I have something solid to compare against.

The concentration of technical knowledge here is impressive. I could walk ten minutes and find nearly any part, material, or expertise I needed. Filters for the engine, transmission, and generator. Fluids. Spare parts for the dinghy’s outboard. Electrical contractors capable of handling a full lithium conversion without drama. The kind of work that usually sends you driving across town—or waiting weeks—was often a short walk away.

That proximity changes how work unfolds. Small tasks don’t get postponed. Questions get answered quickly. Problems shrink instead of growing legs. Over the course of a few weeks, that adds up in ways that are hard to appreciate until you’ve lived through it.

I’m usually wary of talking about “vibe” when it comes to well, anything, but some places earn the word. For me, that came into focus through Jason, the yard manager.

For nearly a week, I was dealing with what is essentially every boat owner’s quiet nightmare: a hole in the boat, with the water kept at bay by a small screw. We needed to haul out. The lift was only a few hundred yards away, but getting there meant moving a single-screw boat—with a bow thruster, yes, but still a single screw—down a narrow raceway lined with yachts worth many times more than Celtic Cross. The winds during that stretch were right on the edge of what I was comfortable with.

Jason understood that immediately.

From the beginning, he said one thing clearly: I want you to feel comfortable moving your boat here to the lift. No pressure. No eye-rolling. No sense that I was holding anyone up. So we waited. We watched the weather. And when Friday finally came with calm air, we moved the boat without drama.

That mattered.

Not because it saved time or money, but because he didn’t make me feel like I was wasting theirs. That kind of professionalism—quiet, patient, confident—is harder to find than any spare part.

Wednesday night at Grumpy Gary’s, the marina staff were having their Christmas party. I ran into a few of them and was greeted like an old friend. Someone said, “Hey, remember Andy? He’s the owner of Celtic Cross over in F dock.” There may have been a little help from the bar, but the warmth felt genuine.

Places like this don’t just make projects easier. They give you a baseline. From here on out, I’ll know what “good” looks like—and I’ll be measuring other harbors against it as I go.

I was walking down Las Olas Avenue in Ft Lauderdale to pick up a Christmas gift.

I stopped into Tommy Bahama and discovered they had a restaurant next door. There was an acoustic guitar player inside—good, relaxed. I sat down, had dinner, and let the music sit where it belonged: in the background, steady and familiar.

But every now and then, something else cut through.

Brass.

At first it was faint—just enough to make you wonder if you were imagining it. Then it came again, louder, carried in from the street. You could feel it more than hear it, the way brass does when it’s played outdoors.

When I finished dinner and stepped back onto the sidewalk, I found the source.

Five guys, right there on the street: 2 trumpets, trombone, tuba, and a snare drum. No amplification. No stage. Just a tight semicircle of sound pushing outward into the evening. They call themselves A-1 Brass.

I learned they come from different HBCUs across the Southeast. Different schools, same musical language. They’re all based out of Broward County now, and it shows in how easily they lock in—rhythm first, horns sharp, the tuba doing that impossible job of being both foundation and motion at the same time.

It wasn’t background music. It stopped people mid-stride. Conversations paused. Phones came out. Smiles spread without anyone quite realizing why.

This is the kind of music you don’t plan for. You don’t buy a ticket. You don’t even know you’re looking for it. It just appears.

Some melodies belong to rooms.
Some belong to streets.

And once in a while, they rise up into the open air and remind you to stop walking.

Check out A1 Brass.

“Devil Wears a Suit and Tie” — Colter Wall

If you haven’t heard Colter Wall, stop reading for a minute. Go look him up. Find the Brewery Sessions on YouTube. You’ll know within the first few lines whether it’s for you—and if it is, you’ll thank me later.

Colter Wall sounds like someone who’s been smoking cigarettes for forty years, hanging around smokehouses, and gargling meat tenderizer along the way. The voice doesn’t quite make sense when you learn how young he actually is.

He’s a Canadian cowboy. Son of a member of Parliament. Raised around a cattle ranch in Saskatchewan. None of that fully explains the sound—but it’s all in there somewhere.

Tonight, Antony pulled the guitar out as the sun was dropping toward the horizon. The boat settling into the evening and a song that fit the light better than anything else could have. He played Devil Wears a Suit and Tie, and for a few minutes everything was perfect.

Check out Antony’s version of Colter Wall’s The Devil Wears a Suit and Tie. (Sorry for the wind noise)

Some people enter your life because of geography.
A short walk.
A familiar dock.
A bar that happens to be close enough to make showing up easy.

That’s how I met Peggy.

Grumpy Gary’s is an easy walk from Harbortown Marina, which is how I found myself there three weeks in a row. Open mic nights have a way of becoming routines when they’re close enough—and Peggy is the constant. She hosts the night, keeps things moving, and somehow makes a rotating cast of musicians feel welcome without making it feel managed.

The first week I played, I was up there alone, working through John Prine’s Paradise. Somewhere in the middle of the song, Peggy (and Kenny) stepped up and added harmony. No conversation beforehand. No planning. Just listening, then joining. It changed the song immediately.

Tonight felt like the natural extension of that moment.
We played a few together—Peggy on guitar, me on mandolin, and then fiddle on one tune. We didn’t rehearsed. Just paying attention to each other and letting the songs land where they wanted to. It was relaxed, unforced, and genuinely fun—the kind of playing that reminds you why you picked the instrument up in the first place.

Open mic nights exist for a reason.

They give people a place to play when there really isn’t anywhere else. Not polished stages. Not ticketed rooms. Just a mic, a small audience, and enough time to get through a song. Skill levels vary. So do nerves. Some people have been playing for decades. Others are still figuring out where their fingers belong.

What everyone brings is the same thing: courage.

I’m not a great fiddle player. I’m not even a good one. I fight intonation. Pitch drifts. Notes land where they shouldn’t. I know all of that before I ever step up. But you don’t get better by not doing it. You can practice alone—and you should—but it’s getting up in front of people that changes things. That pressure sharpens you in ways no quiet room ever will.

That’s what Peggy makes possible.

By running the night, keeping it open, and making space for whoever shows up, she gives people a place to take that risk. To try. To miss a note and keep going anyway. To come back the next week a little better than the last.

Some harbors give you shelter from the weather and space to work.
Sometimes they give you people.

Peggy’s been one of those people here.

Have a listen to our open mic session from Wednesday night.

I came to Harbortown for a lithium upgrade.

That was the plan, anyway. A defined project with clear edges: batteries, charging, power management. Something you could point at on a list and eventually cross off.

That isn’t what happened.

What unfolded instead was a refit—quietly at first, almost politely. One inspection led to another conversation. One adjustment revealed a better way to do something that had been “good enough” for years. The work didn’t arrive all at once. It accumulated.

The first shift came aloft, or close to it. I had Nance and Underwood Rigging come out to inspect the running rigging. It wasn’t urgent, but it was time. From there, the list began to grow: new jib sheets, a new mainsheet, fresh shackles where age had dulled confidence, a new topping lift for the whisker poles. A bent plate on the headsail foil—something subtle, easy to ignore until you know it’s there—got corrected.

Then there were the things I ended up doing myself. I rebuilt the cable for the genoa furler. Installed a hailer I’d been meaning to add for longer than I care to admit. Each task felt small on its own. Together, they started to change how the boat felt under my hands.

And all of this happened alongside the real centerpiece: the lithium upgrade.

That work brought its own orbit of changes. A new alternator for the engine. A new regulator. And then the parts you don’t see unless you go looking—cable runs that suddenly mattered in a way they hadn’t before. We replaced and upsized a number of them outright, particularly between the inverters, the distribution panels, and the batteries, to handle the higher amperages the new system would demand.

The same thinking carried shore-side. The shore power cable was upgraded as well—running from the stern all the way forward to the inverter and distribution—because there’s no point in modernizing one end of the system if the rest of it can’t safely support it.

Supporting systems had to be right if the core was going to be right. Even a few comforts finally crossed the threshold—I installed a television at last, something I’d postponed for years in favor of “more important” projects.

Three weeks went by like that.

The original job never disappeared. It just stopped being the whole story. What arrived as a single upgrade became a broader re-commitment to the boat—to reliability, to confidence, to removing small compromises that add up offshore.

This entry is a marker more than a conclusion.
The work was still underway as I wrote this.
By the time you’re reading it, it will be done.

Update on cooling issue discussed in #3. After removing the rubber boot at the transmission oil cooler and vacuuming it out, I found a healthy amount of debris clogging the screen

That was most certainly contributing to the weak raw water flow.

For this passage, my son Antony is with me.

He’s on leave from Hawaii, where he’s stationed with the Coast Guard at Air Station Barbers Point. He’s an aircrew member and maintainer on the C-130J—search and rescue aircraft that spend their lives launching when someone else is having a very bad day. His work now is hands-on: repairing and replacing components on the Hercules’ engines, keeping the aircraft ready to fly when it matters.

This is the first time he and I have sailed together on our own.

He’s been part of a larger crew before—last summer, on the trip up to New York City—but this is different. Just the two of us. Father and son. Watches to share. Decisions to make. No one else to hand things off to.

This morning, before we left, we had to reinstall the mizzen backstays. Earlier in the week, I’d removed them thinking we’d be going stern-in on the lift. It turned out we didn’t need to—but the rig still needed to go back together properly before departure.

Antony grabbed the tools without hesitation.

Watching him work with the gear I carry onboard—the way he handled the tools, the confidence in his hands, the way he thought through the sequence—made me proud. Not because he surprised me, but because the competence was so evident. The skills he’s been building in the Coast Guard were right there, transferred cleanly from aircraft to sailboat.

He’s becoming a careful, capable problem solver. Someone who understands systems, consequences, and the importance of doing things the right way, even when no one’s watching.

Having him aboard means more than help with the work. It’s a reminder of time passing, of roles shifting, and of how much can change without you quite noticing until you stop and pay attention.

This feels like the right bearing to be on.