Distance: 16 NM/Time 4.5 hours
After two months at anchor, I’ve finally left Stuart for more tropical climes south. I’ve been undecided about where to go next: the Bahamas or the Keys. Simon and Lara showed up in Dragonfly a week or so ago and plan to head down to the Keys for awhile, then perhaps going up to the Tampa Bay area for awhile. Bill and Elise in Phoenix are going to be heading to the Bahamas, doing Andros, then the Exumas and Abacos. They have been trying to convince me to go with them, and I was very tempted. But, the fact is that I simply don’t have any confidence in my engine. It has continued to break down in various and sundry ways since I started this trip, each time requiring parts, delaying my journey. There was no reason to believe this would stop, and the thought of trying to get essential parts shipped to me on some isolated island in a Bahamian island chain was not very appealing. So in the end, I opted to play it safe and stay in the U.S. While I enjoyed my stay in Stuart very much, I really wanted to treat myself to some more tropical surroundings, and clear, green water. So, the Florida Keys was the choice.
But the immediate problem was the winds. They had been blowing pretty hard out of the southeast for weeks, which had prevented a lot of people from crossing over to the Bahamas (including Elisa and Bill). It also prevented me from stowing my dinghy on deck. It is easy to empty it of the bilge pump, fuel tank, oars, and other things, and even remove the outboard to mount it on my stern rail with the strong winds. But the dinghy itself was a problem because I hoist it vertically out of the water using the staysail halyard (through the electric windlass). The 8′ long, fat dinghy provides a huge sail area, making it impossible to control in winds stronger than about 10 knots, which can result in damage to it, Serendipity, or me. So, for the time being, I would have to tow it, which meant that I would not be able to go offshore until I was able get it secured on my foredeck.
The forecast called for a calmer-winds window a few days hence, but I was ready to go. The fouling in the St. Lucie since I had arrived in January hadn’t seemed too bad. But, I also couldn’t see the boat very well; if the sun were in just the right position, I could see a vague outline of my hull, prop, and rudder, but most of the cleaning still had to be done by feel. At least the water wasn’t cold like it had been further north. But, in the last two weeks, perhaps with the warming of the water, the fouling had increased dramatically. I had been able to go almost a month between cleanings when I had first arrived, by now it was needing cleaned once a week! I really wanted to get to a place with less fouling and where I could actually see the bottom of my boat to clean it. It was time to go.
Since I had decided to head south and didn’t need to go offshore to do so (motoring down the ICW on this section was just as quick as motoring south offshore), I decided to depart today, take the ICW south for a few days, hopefully catching that weather window when I was arriving at the Lake Worth Inlet (West Palm Beach), where I could make an offshore run to Key Biscayne. This would allow me to skipp all the horrible traffic and drawbridges between West Palm Beach and Miami. And hopefully, somewhere between here and there, I’d find a weather window with winds slow enough to stow the dinghy.
Before departing, though, I needed to top off some diesel and water Jerry cans and my main water tanks. With the fuel dock facing north south with the St. Lucie River current flowing past, I needed to find a weather window where the winds were either rather calm or moving in the same direction as the current to be able to approach the dock under control. There was suppose to be such a window right after sunup this morning, so I planned to weigh anchor at 7 am and get everything done by 9 am when the wind was supposed to pick up (and the current would switch).
Like the other two times I weighed anchor in the St. Lucie, it and the chain came up very dirty. It was a nasty, muddy mess, actually. I had a lot of growth on the snubber chain that wouldn’t come off and would have to be cleaned some other time. The other bummer was that my Garmin chartplotter wouldn’t come on, despite multiple tries throughout the day. It appeared to have finally bit the dust. BIG bummer since that also meant that I lost my radar since it is only displayed on the chartplotter.
I got to the dock after they opened, but still had to loiter for about 15 minutes to wait for the Candi, the dock hand, to come out to the fuel dock, yet managed to get tied up to the dock without issue thanks to the slack current and wind. It took me about an hour to get everything topped off and my anchor and snubber rinsed a bit more then my deck wash system had been able to. I also added soup and about 15 gallons of freshwater to the bilge since it had been starting to stink, then I was off, under the two Stuart drawbridges, and southbound again.
A worry this time of the year was how clogged up the anchorages along the ICW were going to be between Fort Pierce and the Keys where a lot of cruisers were staged waiting for a weather window to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas . I decided to play it cautiously and chose conservative daily distances so that if my intended anchorage was full, there were still be enough daylight left to find an alternate. I had also been very busy for the two previous days prepping the boat for the possibly long journey to the Keys, and had gotten up early, so I set my sights on one of the anchorages in Hobe Sound, only a modest 15 miles or so south of Stuart.
The passage out of the St. Lucie was uneventful until right at the intersection with the ICW, where I needed to turn right, or southbound. It is very narrow there due to shallows, and although there had been very few other boats venturing out in the high winds so far, as soon as I approached the intersection, there was a boat approaching from both the north and south in the ICW. Not wanting to try to spin around in circles in a very narrow section of the St. Lucie to wait for the southbound traffic to go by, I decided I had plenty of room to pull out in front of him and would probably be going faster than he was, anyway. So I did, but as I turned south, I realized that the large cabin cruiser approaching from the south was hogging the middle of the very narrow channel, if not actually on my side, forcing me to come to the far right side of the channel where the shoals were. I was suddenly in a very precarious position, not being able to turn around or stop due to the following traffic, and not being able to head into deeper water due to the oncoming traffic. As my low water alarm began sounding and I saw 6.5 feet, I nosed as close as I dared into the deeper water and directly at the oncoming cabin cruiser. (Unfortunately, since he coming from my starboard side, he had the right of way.) I slowed down as much as possible and hoped he was smart enough to see how his hogging of the channel was causing me problems. As soon as he passed (only about 10 feet away!) I swung my nose into the middle of the channel and into deeper water. Not the best way to start off the trip!
It is a constant problem that boats with a shallow draft don’t seem to understand that boats with a deep draft need deep water. It is common for them to hog up the deep parts when they could easily yield that to boats who need it. But then, there never was an intelligence test for operating a recreational boat. A career in the Coast Guard taught me that!
The subsequent 10 miles down the ICW were uneventful. The winds were very strong in my face, but it was nice and warm and so not unpleasant. I passed a couple of possible anchorages that were pretty full, but which I could probably have squeezed into if I had to. I noted them and continued. As I approached the large anchorage at Hobe Sound, I could see that there was only one boat there. At this point it was still very early–only around noon–but I decided to pull over at this perfectly satisfactory anchorage instead of gambling that ones further down the lane would be open. After all, I had to go less than 20 miles the next day to get to the Lake Worth inlet where I’d be waiting a day or two for better winds anyway, so I dropped the hook right there and spent the rest of the day relaxing. Oh, and troubleshooting my chartplotter, but to no avail.