They say events are character-forming. I’m writing this on my lap-top in the departure lounge of Nassau airport. That’s right -- Nassau in the Bahamas. I should be in Key West, Florida at the nav table on Lydia B, where all the rest of these Lydialog chapters  have 
been written.
I’m on my way home (to Lydia, that is) after traumatic events in the last three days. Briefly, your skipper was brusquely ejected from the US of A within 36 hours of arriving at Key West, Florida by a gun-toting, hard-staring, deaf-to-any-appeal blonde lady representing the 
teeth of the feared American immigration service.  I’m now a wrong-doer with a finger-printed record. I was stood up against a brown immigration office door and mug-shot like the wanted September 11 New York bombers whose photos adorn the adjacent wall of the same office. If I wasn’t a journalist looking for good copy, I’d be 
stung. Right now I’m on mental overdrive, tired, a bit miffed and non-plussed. Thank goodness I’m not a criminal. Or maybe I am?

But let me go back a bit, because the last you heard from Lydia B was from Isla Mujeres, island outpost of the Mexican Yucatan. We left there last Thursday afternoon, taking advantage of a coming break in the series of Caribbean thunder squalls that will from 
now on increase until full-scale hurricanes arrive from sometime soon until November. 
They give them nice, cosy names like Henrietta and George, but there’s very little that’s 
cosy about them. The first two or three days were quiet as Lydia B sailed and motored  in a near-absence of wind across the Yucatan Straight, then 50 miles off the northwest coast of Cuba. Currents were supposed to be with us, but we never found them. As we entered 
the Florida Straight and neared Key West on Sunday night we switched onto the newly within-range VHF weather broadcasts of the United States National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA does a great job of forecasting weather for sailors, and it’s been good to be back listening to that stacatto, automated voice out at sea. You get to like it as the voice of a slightly retarded but very helpful friend.

Anyway, we could see on Lydia’s port bow a building mass of black cloud over the Florida Keys and knew something was brewing. In the night-time darnkness these clouds look sinister and unreal. They have an ominous shape, billowing grey-black, blotting out the 
stars that reassure us we’re going in the right direction, dense rain-squalls shafting to sea-level which we pick up on the radar. Sometimes you can see them far enough ahead to steer round them. Sometimes they’re so big and develop so quickly you can’t get out of the way. Next we were listening to a special NOAA storm warning of gale-force winds, deadly lightning strikes, very heavy rain and waterspouts. Already tired after three nights at sea, we battened down for an onslaught, reefing just in time before it hit us. 

Our only hope was that the storm was moving west. We were towards its eastern end, and moving north-east, though battling a 3-knot west-going current counter to the infant Gulf Stream emerging the Gulf of Mexico. But these storms are generally short-lived and we were lucky. The bulk of it crossed Lydia’s bow and we escaped with a lashing from its eastern edge, illuminated by immense lightning flashes. We got thrown about a bit.  One entire bookshelf disgorged itself onto the cabin floor and salt somehow penetrated where there was no conceivable way in. But we emerged safely into daylight ten miles south of the 
main shipping channel into Key West. The sun rose, Lydia shook out her mainsail reefs, flew her yankee headsail again and galloped up the bright, buoyed  channel through water pale blue from sky and sand, alongside a big white cruise ship heading for Key West to disgorge yet another load of  overnight trippers. They lined the rails to photograph Lydia as the ship overtook us. Did they wish they were sailing on our adventurous little boat rather than the big, comfortable liner?

Pretty well exhausted, we dropped the hook off Wisteria Island opposite town, called up 
the US coastguard on the VHF to ask about entry formalities to the United States and – well, that’s when things took off.

Clearance formalities are done with the US Customs, who issue a cruising permit for the boat, with the Department of Agriculture who vet incoming fruit and veg (we surrendered  all ours – Mexican oranges, onions, tomatoes and garlic); and with the Department of Immigration, who guard the many scattered gates of this immense, cosmopolitan country against undesirable intruders. They do their job with the unsmiling, unsentimental, 
unhearing dedication of a pack of Weimaraners. It’s the cold unsmilingness that hits a lazy, 
laissez-faire English person like me. It’s struck me with sudden clarity, three years into North American life, that there really is a difference between national cultures, and it’s to be 
found somewhere, chillingly, here. In the last few days I’ve felt a new affinity with my European – I think it’s that, not just English – roots.

So here I am, newly arrived in America – with US citizen Rachel alongside, knocking on the immigration office door, passport ingenuously in hand, voluntarily reporting our arrival in 
the United States and seeking permission to cruise up the East coast. On the other side of 
the split, counter-top door is a woman in white T-shirt with INS INSPECTOR in big letters on the back, macho navy blue heavy cotton shorts festooned with bulging patch pockets 
and crotch creases and white, turned-up running shoes. She has straight, blonde hair and 
I’d guess is about early forties. Her waist is hung with a stiff black leather belt containing holstered revolver (soon I haven’t the faintest doubt she’d use it), several ammunition pouches, cell-phone (or phones) and gas or pepper spray. I can’t quite decide if her look is mean or worried. I’m scrutinizing her for evidence of femininity. Her posture is more that of 
a hunting male panther, with dandruff. She doesn’t walk; she swaggers to impress.

So far, I haven’t a clue what’s about to happen. Panther-woman keeps our passports.  Rachel’s is cleared, but not mine, though she doesn’t hand it back to Rachel yet. Stapled inside mine is a US 90-day visa-waiver from August 2001, which I should have handed in when I left the USA on the way down the Pacific coast from Canada to Mexico. I didn’t, so (says panther lady) I was illegally in the United States from mid-November to January 21, when I sailed south from California. Quite erroneously, the valid six-month cruising permit issued in Washington State, way back up the Pacific, had managed to convince me my presence was legal. More than this, says panther lady, I didn’t have a current visa to 
re-enter the United States. (British citizens don’t need one, but I discover they do if they 
arrive by private boat. If they’re heard at all, these rules are whispered, not shouted).

Panther lady steps aside to make out-of-earshot phone calls to head office, returns and announces I have to leave the country immediately.

I can choose either to leave on Lydia B, given a few hours to re-provision and escorted to the 12-mile limit by the US coast guard, or I can fly out of the country. ‘But my boat; it’s my home….?’ – ‘You WILL be leaving by tomorrow night….’ Not a trace of sympathy, no feminine softness. This lady’s in command of the trees.

It takes a while for things like this to sink in, back on Lydia B, anchored just off town, overnight. I keep thinking: they just want to scare me. We’ll go in tomorrow and they’ll 
wag a stern finger and say they’ve decided to issue a visa after all. They’ll see I’m a 
harmless pensioner.

In the morning we’re again chasing up flights to Nassau on the internet, car hire 
companies for the drive from Key West to Miami, Greyhound buses and the US Embassy in Nassau. Will I get a visa quickly – or at all? Isn’t there an outside chance I won’t be 
allowed back into the United States and I’ll be parted for good from Lydia B, left with Rachel alone on board? What then? Panther woman has neither guarantees nor visible concern. I keep asking questions, meekly suggesting that although I accept I’ve broken 
the rules, I haven’t done much harm. Goodness, I’m a pensioner these last four days, fresh from my 65^th birthday at sea. Panther-woman pokes her face at me and warns me – B-movie-style – she’s getting upset. That’s the last thing, I guess, you want to make an immigration inpector do. I shut up.

At last we find a flight from Miami to Nassau and book it. I have to pay for it when I get to Miami airport. Not good enough, says Ms immigration lady. She phones the airline herself. I have to pay for the flight before I leave Key West. She wants to see the ticket. Can’t, says the airline. Go and find a local travel agent, says the blonde panther; book it again. Which we do, then return and show her the ticket. Then, having hired a car and tossed a few things into a back-pack, we abandon Lydia B on her anchor-chain and drive to Miami, Rachel at the wheel. It’s a beautiful drive up the Florida Keys. But is this the last time I’ll see 
it – or Lydia B? Of course not. I’m dramatizing. Which is exactly what you do in these circumstances.

Soon I’m in the air, then I’m giving my late-night story to the Bahamian immigration service at Nassau airport. There’s a problem -- there’s no US stamp in my passport to account for 
my provenance. The Bahamians sympathise, are friendly and give me ten days to get the 
US visa. An officer finds me somewhere to stay. I bed down after midnight in a seedy, 
empty hotel – “under new management” (though that seems to be a total staff of one mildly-spoken, polite Indian gentleman from, he says, Madras. Don’t tell me any more that national cultures aren’t different.) near the centre of Nassau, just round the corner from the American embassy. No tea, but I manage to get a cup of lukewarm coffee and a shower. The Hilton’s on the opposite side of the road. But the sheets are clean – and anyway, I’m bushed.

In the morning as I’m collecting up my overnight things there’s a huge thunderstorm. Nassau roads are awash. I’ll get drenched on the 200-yard walk to the embassy. It isn’t a very encouraging self-image. I see myself dripping onto the embassy carpet, belongings in 
a white cloth shopping bag, pleading to be let into the United States. They’ll already have seen my criminal record on the computer. Panther lady will have made sure. I’m tired, hungry, homeless and disorientated, like the bag-lady on the streets of London.

I get to the visa application office five minutes before official opening time, open the door – and an confronted by a sea of queueing Bahamians all after the same vital piece of paper as me. It’s going to take ages to deal with all these people. My hopes for a return to Miami on the five o’clock flight that afternoon plummet. Or is it just because I’m tired and short of food? I fill in the visa form and hand it in with $65 dollars. Yesterday it was $45; it’s gone up just because I’m bad. In answer to the form’s question ‘Have you ever been refused entry to the United States?’ I say ‘yes’.

There’s a 20-minute wait. The Bahamians seem to be getting their visas and leaving one by one. No word of mine. I’ll never see Lydia again. Then a female voice comes over the loudspeaker – ‘Ian Laval. Please go to window three.’

It’s an older State Department official. She has my forms. But she’s smiling. How I need that smile! She asks what I’m doing in North America. Sailing a boat from British Columbia to England, I say. She smiles again. I gobble it up. She points to my answer about being 
refused entry, and I recount the previous two days’ events at the Key West immigration office. She checks the computer and seems already to know. ‘Why…….?’ she begins, then pauses and seems to want to tell me she’s surprised I was summarily thrown out. She can’t, of course. Then, pointing to my Cumbrian origins on the application form – “ Do you know Carlisle Castle? I was there two years ago. I was posted to the embassy in London”. Crisis over. My hopes soar. Somebody’s human. My visa is ready ten minutes later and I walk out onto the streets of central Nassau. There are still huge puddles, but the rain’s stopped. I’m 
in a typical English town, where traffic drives on the left and friendly, white-jacketed  policemen, with no guns, saunter in pairs along the pavements of The Bay, the main shopping street. I’m no longer a bag-lady. Somebody wants me.

I have a beer and a burger at the Pirate Bar and make the airport in plenty of time for the 5.0pm back to Miami. It’s delayed an hour – but what does that matter? I’ve e-mailed Rachel, who’s driving the 140 miles again from Key West to meet me, having dealt the previous night with her own crisis aboard Lydia. A Canadian boat dragged its anchor and drifted into Lydia’s bow, being stopped just after colliding with Lydia’s bowsprit. Lydia took it on the chin. There’s no damage, except to nerves.

We’re back on Lydia by midnight. Legitimate.

Key West, Saturday, June 15.

Strong southerly winds and heavy rain continue and Lydia’s bouncing around on her anchor-chain.We’ve had another wicked line-squall this afternoon. Torrential rain driven by a 40-knot wind blotted out virtually all visibility. Caught in a strong tidal current at her anchorage off Key West, Lydia didn’t know which way to point, to the wind or the stream, and we stood ready in case she waltzed her anchor out of the sand. But she didn’t. The thunder’s still rolling around.

In the next couple of days we’ll take a last look round this attractive sub-tropical town, 
with its streets of well-kept, white wooden houses, green trees and busy pleasure-dock 
scene and get ready to leave northwards up Florida as soon as this weather lifts. Key West’s atmosphere belies that of the US immigration service and Panther lady. She asked – I don’t know how anxiously – if I’d be writing about it. Yes, I said. But I’d try to be fair.

Love & best wishes
Ian & Rachel,
Lydia B.

Vero Beach, Florida, Saturday June 22/02.

Hello, Friends:

Feeling a bit poor and want to know where all your money went? Take a look down here.

Lydia B’s now sailing (chiefly with the iron genny, that is) up the Intra-Coastal Waterway, a sort 
of ditch inside the US east coast that takes you in relative safety from the weather as far as North Carolina and the Chesapeake. I’d call it a canal, but that gives no impression of the mind-boggling private wealth lining its southern banks. The buildings and boats you pass for hundreds of Florida miles are anything but derelict industrial warehouses and rusting coal-barges.

The glitz began at Miami, where we arrived at the end of a tough, offshore passage from Key West, riding the Gulf Stream flowing north-east outside the reef that guards the southern tip of this orange-growing holiday state. Short of somewhere to anchor, we tied up at a marina beneath the sky-gazing hotel blocks of Miami Beach. Clean, white concrete (even if it was behind locked security gates), someone to take a line as we approached and tied up Mediterranean-style 
between wooden piles, a shower ashore for the first time in ages – we’ve been so long at sea, 
living continuously with sticky sweat. And a deli a few yards away for coffee and a croissant next morning before pulling out, past the city-centre dockyards, the maze of route marker posts – red triangles to port, green squares to starboard – on up the ICW. It’s all so different.

Across a confusing waterway junction in downtown Miami, Lydia B pushed through town by 
wind and tide, searching for the correct exit before we miss it and all the time watching the depth gauge – shoals and shallow water in the ICW are the daily problem now – and soon we’re rounding the bend to the Rickenbacker Highway Bridge, with a main-road span 76 feet over the water – plenty of height for Lydia B – then the Venetian Causeway highway bridge, the first of dozens of lifting bridges (mostly bascule and double bascule, as they’re correctly called). We call the bridge-keeper up on VHF channel 9 and ask him or her to let us past. “Come right on down and we’ll get you through.”  We say a “thankyou. Lydia B standing by zero nine.” We’ve by now got our radio patter pretty sharp. Bells clang, road barriers come down, traffic stops – country 
lane or Highway Route 1, it makes no difference – the bridge lifts and Lydia B, all 50 feet of her from sea to mast-top radio aerial go through the bridge and we call a radio thanks or wave to the keeper looking down from the turret before there’s another bell-clanging and the bridge closes. It works like clockwork, even for this insignificant little ship. This is America.

So far we’ve touched bottom only once, pushed aside by a speeding powerboat that bounced us with its wake and dropped Lydia B onto her bottom as we edged out of the way to the side of the channel. But the bottom’s soft mud and it was a gentle reminder not to be so English polite. As I say, this is America.

Vero Beach, where we are now, is a typical, municipally-owned marina. We’re on a mooring 
buoy for eight dollars a night – though we have the use of showers and washing machines etc ashore, plus unlimited access to midges (no-see-ums) from the neighbouring mangroves. They 
pack a fearful punch and just love this still, damp air, so we’ve got bug-netting up and a citronella candle in the cockpit. In fact it’s critter-ville on Lydia B at the moment. We’ve had an infestation 
of cockroaches, probably brought aboard with the groceries. Swatting them’s a waste of time – they’re greased lightning and seem to be able to tune into your attack mode before you can lift a hand. So we’ve got cotton-wool balls soaked in insecticide in locker-bottoms, plus a dozen roach hotels stuck up round the boat. The idea is that they scurry out for a quick meal and don’t live to regret it. I think we might be winning.

We’ve got rid of our accumulated rubbish (garbage) – a constant problem on a travelling boat (that’s ‘traveling’ to North Americans. Even the language is different). We’ll fill up with diesel and water (no longer having to worry if the water’s drinkable. It’s America), empty the sewage holding tank (which we usually do out at sea, but not in the ICW, where it’s illegal anyway) at the marina pump-out and be on our way northwards tomorrow. Soon we’ll be in Georgia, then the Carolinas, North and South, listening intently to NOAA weather radio for the possibility of  cyclonic weather in the distance and keeping an eye open for bolt-holes to batten down in. They take hurricanes seriously round here. I’ll be glad to reach the Chesapeake.

Love & best wishes,
Ian & Rachel.

Lydia B enters downtown Miami and the Intra-Coastal Waterway (ICW).

 
L - Double-bascule bridge opens on the ICW for Lydia B.    R - Rachel steers into the ICW.

 
Nice little place. One of thousands on the ICW in Florida.


Life in the fast lane on the ICW.

Introduction     0 - Inside Passage and northern British Columbia

1 - British Columbia to El Salvador   2 - Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama 

4 - Intra-Coastal Waterway to Washington DC      5 - Brentwood Bay BC and Chesapeake     

6 - Virginia & Atlantic to Azores        7 - Azores, Ireland & England

8 - Chevy through the US - 1       9 - Chevy through the US - 2