We are just getting ready to cross the Gulf Stream tonight after several weeks in Florida. It is just miserably hot and surprisingly urban. For this Mainer, Florida has been a shocking juxtaposition of wild exotic jungle and cold high rises. The evidence of great wealth that we saw in portions of the coast while in Maine have become more great the further we go South. One thousand miles of  yuuuge vacation homes!  My Bernicratic sensibilities struggle to reconcile the evidence of climate change with the evidence that wealthy people don’t worry about climate change.

When we arrived in West Palm beach my idealistic brain was startled by the contrast between how I imagined Florida (like Maine only warmer) and how it actually is (like a stretched out city). It reminds me how I felt when I first saw Old Orchard Beach and I was so surprised that it wasn’t a beautiful beach surrounded by apple trees. Florida is a land of high rises waiting to get washed away or fall into sink holes. If you believe that climate change is real, it makes you tear your hair out.

Everytime we try to swim, we’ve been warned away by locals who are concerned about discharges from lake Okeechobee, or else the water is gross looking, or today it was so clear we could see the masses of jellyfish. Do I sound complainy? Sorry but I’m so HOT and my family back home are enjoying the first ice storm of the season!  I guess the grass is always greener, or the weather is somehow better somewhere else. This adventure has been quite a lot of work so far, but soon we’ll be able to swim off the boat. We checked passage weather and windyty, and we believe wave height will be low and getting lower through the night, and we should have a westerly breeze that will also die down as we approach West End Bahamas in the morning. It’s been three months and now we are ready to play!