Distance: 191 nm/Time: 34 hours
It was nice being able to sleep in and enjoy the relatively cool morning air and the scenery of Gasparilla Island. Since I had time, I cooked myself a nice omelette breakfast and went up on deck to enjoy the scenery.
Those of you familiar with Tampa know about the annual Gasparilla festival, Tampa’s Mardi Gras. It is based on the supposed exploits of the evil pirate Jose Gaspar, also known as Gasparilla.
The celebration involves a pirate force invading the city (a huge boat parade), followed by a series of street parades and other debauchery.
Gasparilla Island was, according to local lore, his main staging location and even the location of a hidden treasure! (Although this seems to be a story concocted by developers in the 1800’s to entice people to the island.) Nonetheless, he had been active in the area, and it was interesting to wonder if he had ever anchored in the very spot I was in.
I weighed anchor at 10:00 as planned. Unlike the Manatee River bottom, it was all sand around Gasparilla Island, and so both the anchor and the chain came up clean. I motored out the main channel which was packed with recreational fishing boats. A friend had texted me earlier that Boca Grande was the Tarpon fishing capitol of the world, and it seemed obvious that they were biting this morning! I could actually see schools of some rather large fish breaking the surface all around the boats. I had to weave my way around them so as not to interfere with their fishing.
I followed the main channel to the southwest this time and ended up motoring for about 3 hours before the winds picked up a bit out of the southwest, so I set the Mizzen, Main, and Genoa (in that order), which took about 15 minutes. That gave me about 5 knots over the ground which I was perfectly satisfied with. Although quieter than motoring, it did require more work as, just like the previous day, the wind continually veered, requiring me to retrim the sails about every hour.
By about 8:00 pm the winds had died, so I took the sails down, started the engine, and set a course direct to Marathon. With the increase in speed due to the engine (around 6.5 knots), the GPS said that we would be getting there around 10 am or so. That caused me a bit of consternation, as I had no idea what I would be doing all day in the windless, oppressive heat hanging out at anchor at Marathon, but I also knew I didn’t need to worry about it until the morning, and still had a long night ahead of me, so started setting up my “watch” schedule.1
I had one minor maintenance issue. As it got dark and difficult to see the wind and depth instruments mounted about six feet in front of the helm, I decided to adjust their brightness. But when I got to the wind indicator and hit the Display button, instead of turning on the backlighting like it was supposed to, the instrument just quit! No matter what I tried, it seemed to have completely died. Great! But, by morning it was working again, so now at night I just shine a flashlight on it!
The night was actually quite beautiful, especially once the moon came up. There were just a few clouds, tons of stars and visibility was great. It was almost like daytime. There were even times of phosphorescent activity in the wake of the boat which added to the beauty. I wish I hadn’t been too tired to fully enjoy it!
The dawn was magical. Just enough clouds to make the sky interesting, the moon still up, and the water so flat and mirror-like that it seemed fake. At times it didn’t even seem like the boat was moving. I had to look back at the wake to make sure. (Ok, maybe I was getting some of lack-of-sleep hallucinations.) The sun seemed to bring new energy to me, so I decided to try out my camp shower in the cockpit. I took a very refreshing shower, changed clothes, and decided to try to knock out my yoga routine in the cockpit. A bit awkward at first, but I eventually figured out how to get all my poses to work.
The GPS now had my ETA into Boot Key Harbor in Marathon as 10:30 am. The forecast was calling for no winds and a high of 91 degrees. That meant the interior of my boat was going to be even hotter! There was no way I would be able to sleep without AC, fan or no fan. So there would be no point of hanging around at anchor all day.
I did some quick calculations of the distance and time to next planned stop after Marathon, which was Rodriguez Key, about halfway between Marathon and Miami. It would be just under 50 miles and about 8 hours at my current, motoring speed. And, I would continue to be motoring as there were no winds forecast. That meant if my refueling at Marathon went without problems, and I finished up at say, 11:00 am, I could get to Rodriguez Key before dark. I decided to see how the refueling went, and more importantly, how I felt after that.
The bad thing about doing all this after Memorial Day was how hot it was. The good thing was that it was now officially “off season”. Most of the smart people had already either moved their boats up north away from the heat and hurricanes or had put them “on the hard” (in a boat yard) for the season. That meant that anchorages, marinas, and fuel docks were rather empty. And that was the case for the normally-very-busy Boot Key Harbor in Marathon. I passed only two runabouts on my way in the channel, and the fuel dock was (thankfully) completely empty.
I swung around so I was facing outbound again and coasted to a gentle stop as a lady came out to help me tend lines. The whole process took 30 minutes (39 gallons and $142), and then she shoved me off, and I was back on the road.
Now with a full tank and having successfully accomplished my first single-handed mooring to a fuel dock, I felt full of energy so brought the throttle up to cruise, plugged in the course to Rodriguez Key, and headed east for the first time!
The trip up Hawk Channel (the channel inside all the reefs which lie south of the Keys) was uneventful. It indeed proved very hot.
However, there were two steps I had taken before leaving Tampa to mitigate the heat, both of which played huge dividends over the next few days. The first was purchasing an ice maker (at the recommendation of the Mottas.) This amazing little $85 machine could make 26 lbs of ice per day! You just pour water into it, turn it on, and six minutes later (and every six minutes thereafter, as long as you keep feeding it water every so often) you have about of cup of ice cubes.
What a difference having ice-cold water at my beck and call meant for regulating my internal body temperature.
The second was a sunshade for the rear of the cockpit. I knew that the solar panels (whether up or down) would provide lateral shade when I was at the wheel. But they didn’t quite extend all the way to the transom, meaning if the sun were directly overhead to anywhere aft, it would be beating down on my head and back. So I cut and trimmed and added grommets to a piece of tarp a few days before I left, and it worked great. I could put it up or take it down in about a minute, and it also made a huge difference. With my solar panels down (as they could be when motoring because the engine alternator kept the batteries topped off) and the tarp up, I had a nice little shade cocoon at the helm!
There was a bit of traffic in Hawk Channel during the day, mostly big motor yachts heading south for some reason. I could tell they were from the big city because even when they were passing close by, none of the people aboard ever returned my waving at them. Strange. And sad.
I arrived in the large Rodriquez Key anchorage to find only three or four other boats there spread far apart. I set the anchor without a problem, had a quick bit to eat, calculated that I had only about an 8-hour trip the following day, then crashed heavily, knowing I needed to catch up on a lot of rest and that I’d be able to sleep in in the morning.
All in all I had done about 190 miles in 44 hours and basically cut two days off the trip compared to if I had hopscotched down the coast and waited to rest up in Marathon. I was making great time!
- Normally, if one is not single handed, a watch routine is set up. At watch is required mainly to ensure that boats don’t collide, but also to trim sails, monitor the engine, keep an eye on the weather, course and speed, etc. It depends on how many crew there are, but a person’s watch is typically two hours on and two hours off, or two hours on and four hours off, etc.
Being single-handed, didn’t have the luxury of being able to be relieved by anyone. Yet, it was important to keep at least some kind of watch. What most single-handed sailors do is take a nap, but set a timer for 20 minutes. Every 20 minutes you wake up, look around the horizon to ensure no other vessels will be an issue, look around at the weather (and the sails if they are up), the wind direction, the radar, and the engine temperature and oil pressure if it is running. That takes all of a minute, typically, then back to sleep for another 20 minutes. Twenty minutes is used because that is a compromise between how fast typical vessels move vs. how far one can see, etc. The idea is that in most situations, if the horizon is clear when going to sleep, it’s unlikely that a collision would occur before 20 minutes. Having the radar helped a lot, especially on such a calm, flat night because it’s “visual” horizon was bigger (because it was mounted up on the mast, and because radar bends a bit over the horizon). My radar also has an alarm function, which will sound if anything shows up within a certain distance. So in the circumstances I was in, I felt quite comfortable sleeping for 20 minutes at a time.
However, it is not at all restful. Each time, it seemed like just as I was falling asleep and getting into a dream, the timer would go off. I’d roust myself, do my checks, get back to sleep, another dream would just start, and then the timer would go off again. From 8:00 pm to 6:00 am I had to do this 30 times! Some sailors who single-hand on long passages might do this routine 24/7 for weeks at a time! It is supposedly common for them to start hallucinating after about a week, and is just something they expect and deal with. ↩︎