We have a wonderful Christmas holiday together with my sister Inge, Mark, Luc, Tess and Merel. The report of this holiday comes from Inge ...

What do you do when your sister lives in America for a year, and the traditional Christmas dinner for the whole family falls in the water? Exactly, then you fly there for a Christmas dinner there. Christmas in sunny Florida? We didn't have to think about that for very long.

 

On Sunday December 24th at 6 pm we - Mark, Inge, Luc, Tess and Merel - set foot on American soil in Miami. With a rental car we plunge into madness on highway 95, with yakking cars without lights, and in less than an hour we drive to Deerfield Beach where the family is waiting for us with a plate of pasta. How nice! We chat a bit, but soon close our eyes, of course with a melatonin pill from Toine. The first impressions are promising. Coziness: check. Tasty temperature: check. Palm trees, with or without Christmas lights: check. Swimming pool: check. Refrigerator with ice crusher: check. This is going to be fine.

Breakfast on Christmas Day: toast with cookie butter, muesli, and fresh papaya! A cup of coffee tastes good on the terrace by the pool. Today we visit the beach - we walk and the kids on our bikes - and the Subway, because at some point the stomachs start to rumble of course 😊. Further swimming, paddle boarding and preparing the Christmas dinner. With five courses we don't match the Dutch dinners, but it's delicious (America and meat!) and terribly cozy. We play nice music and have a lot of fun together. We enjoy our five adolescents, with their own characters who are forming more and more. What a rich life!

 

On Tuesday we make a tour through the area past schools, shops and supermarkets. Eline's school is closed but we see the swimming pool and get a good impression of how big it is. Funny detail: a mega-large parking lot for the cars and a small corner for up to 10 bikes ... At Marinthe's school there is plenty of tennis and we say hi In the evening we have dinner in a good steakhouse at the ICW (Inter Coastal Waterway).

Then it's time to see more of Florida! On Wednesday we drive southwest to the Everglades (Hey, another Subway, hit that) for a cool airboat trip through the swamps. Goes fast and is super fun. We see alligator 'Al' in the wild and then hold a small crocodile. Lots of tourists here, but very rewarding. It is a bizarre, barren landscape, especially compared to the built-up east coast of Florida.

 

One day later, we go out again, direction Key LargoCaribbean atmosphere here, nice! We go snorkeling in the azure, clear water. A boat takes us to the reef off the coast. Lots of fish, some jellyfish, a ray and Eline even sees a shark. In this part of Florida you can still see the damage of the hurricaneThe coral is damaged, there are heaps of debris on the street that haven't been cleared yet. Luckily the population is slowly picking up again. We don't notice anything else. It's a lovely, sunny day that we end with eating a nice fish at the beach.

 

On Friday it says Miami In the mundane Miami Beach we see a bit of art deco, huge cruise ships, beach and lots of palm trees and eat delicious Mexican tacos and fajitas. On the way back we pay a short visit to Little Havana after some searching. Nice day.

 

Saturday we take it easy. We cycle a bit and the idea is to go shooting in a gun storeWe find one, but we keep watching the shooting range for fifteen minutes at the most, where huge shots are fired at paper targets, but also at the heads of people who have been drawn. Everyone feels a little bit better. uncannyThere is no aggression, but in our opinion this goes a bit further than innocent entertainment. We go home and get ready for a two-day sailing trip to West Palm Beach.

Because that's where we celebrate New Year's Eve ... via the ICW motorbikes we go under about 14 bridges, past cabinets of houses. Along the way we see a family endearing manatees (manatees)! After about 6 hours of sailing in West Palm Beach, we see the perfect anchorage: just past Mar-a-Lago, Trump's country house, with a view of the fireworks boat that is already there for the upcoming spectacle. According to the map, it is 5 metres deep here, well enough for the SeaQuest. However, the map does not take into account a large ridge of sand that is accumulating further and further due to the tidal current. We are quite stuck in one fell swoop. This is especially unpleasant for Mira and we notice that all the 'akkefietjes' they have had with the SeaQuest over the past few months have not gone into cold clothes. Toine keeps his head cool. Just to be sure, he calls the American towing service, but an hour later, when a boat arrives, the rising water makes us loose. The tug takes us to a new anchorage a few hundred metres away. There we are even more perfect, in the middle of West Palm Beach with only a few other sailing boats.

 

On the way back we sailed outside, sailing with a nice breeze in our backs and a sun on our faces, again passing Trump with his US coastguard And as if this holiday wasn't perfect enough, a family of dolphins swims with us for a short while and we sail past a large, bobbing sea turtle! Our first sailing trip on real sea. What a nice day.

 

Just before our return to the Netherlands, the weather changes. Also in Florida it can get cold and wet from time to time. For us it's no problem. We have a nice last day, with a visit to a sea turtle shelter, Star Wars in a cinema with Business Class loungers and a 18 oz. sirloin steak in the Outback.

It was a wonderful Christmas holiday in Florida. Mira, Toine, Eline and Marinthe: thanks, have fun and see you in six months!

... a wonderful story of my sister. We have little to add, but a few things ...

The past few days it has been quite cold. Not comparable with the rest of East America, but also we in the Sunshine State are experiencing a bit of it with very strong winds and cold nights (near freezing).

On December 31 Toine's birthday is 🎉 and he gets a drone as a present. A nice toy with which we hope to make nice movies of our sailing trip the coming year. Pretty hard to drive such a thing, so that's a bit of practice.

 

The last week of the holiday I spent a lot of hours as webmaster improving the website for the Hallberg-Rassy-Rassy Connection, which went live on 30 December 2017 and already has 54 members. If you own a Hallberg-Rassy and you are not yet a member ... take a look at Hallberg-Rassy Connection 👍.

And last but not least ... at the end of the old year, a look back at a sailing year with an unusual number of issues with the boat. Ranging from a suddenly rolling anchor in a rough sea near Scheveningen, the nightly collision with the weather buoy, mast problems in Biscay, clutch cable broken on arrival in Florida and a faltering gyro compass which leads to some unwanted initiative of the SeaQuest in choosing her course. And then a solid stranded at old age with a water depth difference of 3 meters compared to the map ?!? In The Gambia, ok. But in Florida ???? The strange thing is that almost all of them have no mutual relationship. So, yes, this is also part of sailing. Often fun and relaxing, sometimes just dangerous, bad luck and hard work. We make an analysis of every situation and adjust our sailing behaviour, risk prevention or maintenance procedures where necessary and 'hup, just keep going'. Confidence will have to grow back a bit, we are n

But first we have to enjoy Florida. Next week a normal week with school.