17 days, 16 hours - 04:00, we have arrived at the dock!  Time for a celebration drink and then good night!  Snowflake, standing by on 16.

The repairs to the autopilot have been completed.  Now the boat and crew are ready to make the run to Key West.  We are waiting on the high tide to lift us off the bottom and provide sufficient depth to permit clear passage out of the Ft Lauderdale channel.  This should be by about 18:00 EDT.  With leaving in the evening, our 36 hour run to Key West will put us in the morning. That will be our last fuel stop before we cross the Gulf of Mexico. 

We would need double our fuel capacity running the engine the way we ran down the east coast.  The adverse current and light wind kept us motoring at higher RPMs.  To conserve fuel, we will need some favorable winds to help speed our crossing, because commitments for the crew are becoming a concern.

We are scooting down the Florida coast, finally making some progress against the Gulf Stream. It is one thing to understand that the Gulf Stream is a river of water flowing northward along the east coast, quite another when your knot meter indicates you are moving at 7.5 knots but GPS say, sorry you are only going 4.5 knots!

Anyway, we are getting ready to pull into Ft Lauderdale for a day and half layover. Clean up the boat, clean up the crew, repair the autopilot, re-provision the boat, fuel up and make the final push down around the Keys and across the Gulf!

We are all well and looking forward to a hot shower and a little rum! More later - Snowflake standing by on 16 - Out.

I have been looking into a reasonable way to receive grib files during our delivery while offshore. Before I get into what I have found just a little background. A grib file contains weather information that with a proper viewer and definitions provides wind direction and intensity, isobar and wave height forecasts for the area we intend to sail into. Because of their relatively small size, grib files are well suited for sending through slow links associated with offshore communications.

We have two choices on Snowflake, we can communicate either through a single side band (SSB) radio or by satellite phone.  Using the satellite phone, with a data communication link for connecting to a laptop is fairly straight forward.  Somewhat like using a cell phone tethered to a laptop.  Hook it up, pay the airtime and there you have it, access to the internet - albeit slow, but still the internet.  However,  I wanted to find a way to use the SSB. 

I'm not sure why the SSB has me intrigued.  It's not that I don't have enough technology in my life that I need to add finding a way to connect a HF (high frequency) radio (which in its own has enough buttons and knobs to keep me busy the entire trip) to my laptop, establish a communications link, request a file via email and then wait for it to be sent to my account, download it into my laptop - well you get the point.  For some reason, it is appealing to me to send email through a terrestrial based long range radio non-digital communication system.  Luckily, I found two options, which I will cover in a later post.  For now, we are discussing which makes the most sense for us.  Stay tuned! (ok, I couldn't resist)

We are getting ready to deliver a 42 foot Valiant to Kemah, TX.  Our expected departure is April 25th.  The boat is undergoing it's final prepartion and the crew is beginning to assemble to outfit and provision.  A series of sea trials to assure the boat is ready and then, weather permitting, we will begin the run down the east coast.