It's
just past 2100 on the night of the 12th, and I'm on watch, listening
to a college radio station out of St. Augustine as I lounge in the
cockpit. We have finally gotten far enough south that we can sit
outside comfortably, and it's a beautiful night. The gentle waves are
decorated in silver sparkles from the almost-full moon, and every so
often a dolphin's fin or blowhole breaks the surface beside the
boat.
The dolphins are mesmerizing. This afternoon, Britt and I sat out on the bow pulpit watching as a dozen or more cavorted in the bow wave, turning and twisting and jumping. Their sleek bodies move at our paltry 6 knots without any observable effort. We could hear them squeaking and snorting as they rode along. Of course it's anthropomorphizing like crazy to say that they are playing, or to think that they care that there are life-forms aboard this boat watching them, but even if they're just catching a convenient boost from our wake on their way south, they are great fun to have as escorts.
The Coast Guard announced on the radio this afternoon that two Northern Right Whales had been sighted, not far from St. Augustine. It would have been neat to have seen them -- from a distance, of course. They are a protected species and boaters are warned not to approach them. We don't need the warning, having seen the Nantucket Whaling Museum's display on the Essex tragedy, the real-life inspiration for Melville's Moby-Dick.
We're
about ten miles off Flagler Beach, headed for Port Canaveral. Since
we passed the St. John River -- the entrance to Jacksonville -- we
haven't seen another boat. I'm keeping watch in our standard slack
way for less traveled areas: every 15 minutes I do a visual check of
the horizon, and check the sails and the instruments to make sure
everything's good. Every once in a while I take the radar out of
standby to see if there's anything out there farther away than
I can see with my eyeballs. We did fine without the radar before
we got it, but now that we have it we use it at night and whenever we
are motoring (since it doesn't "cost" any power while motoring). We
have our instrument readouts all echoed on our computer, so there's
no reason to go upstairs except for sail adjustments, and we've been
hiding out belowdecks during most of our cold-weather passages. How
nice it is to get back up into the open air!
The morning we left, the waters around Fernandina Beach were thick with fog. As on the past few days, the forecast called for clearing by afternoon, but the fog has obviously not been listening to NOAA weather radio. After taking on fuel and water, we felt our way out to the St. Mary's River entrance, where the fog was thin enough that we could at least see the next few marks ahead of us.
As we motored down the marked channel, we could see a distinctive yellow tugboat behind us, approaching fast. We scooted to the edge of the channel, but he was still directly behind, and soon he called us on VHF. "Sailboat outbound St. Mary's River, be advised, we are ahead of a deep draft naval vessel which requires the full width of the channel."
No problem; we scootched over some more, since there was plenty of depth just outside the channel for us. We peered through the mist, looking for a huge warship, and then realized what the "deep draft naval vessel" had to be. Sure enough, as the tug came by us, we could see the tower of a massive sub cutting through the water. The top of the sub's hull just broke the surface, sending a wave cascading across it and out into a wake. The sailors perched on the tower waved as they passed, and we waved back.
It had been a tough call on whether we should make the passage or not. A frontal passage was forecast, light southwest winds becoming northeast and strong. Since we were going south, north winds would be good, but we'd be without the land protection we'd had on our previous offshore jumps -- we had been going along southwest-trending shorelines, but now would be going southeast -- so the waves might build up to some size. One boat that we'd discussed traveling with decided to stay in Fernandina, and even the tugboat captain warned us on the VHF that the placid weather was due to get nasty.
But after having listened to the VHF forecasts and looked at the weather faxes, we made a thoughtful decision to go offshore, and it turned out to be a good one. We counted on two things: first, the VHF forecast sounded better than the faxes looked, and because the latter covered more area we took it to be a more general forecast, less applicable to our specific area. Second, the VHF forecast for the region between us and St. Augustine sounded worse than the forecast for the area south of St. Augustine. Our friends on another boat picked up a forecast for even further south, which sounded even better. We inferred from this, and from the faxes, that as we sailed south we'd get away from the bad weather. We could also see from the surface analysis that we'd be getting only the edge of the frontal passage
In fact, the forecast winds mostly failed to materialize, and we motored most of the way in light winds (4-7 knots, not enough to make sufficient speed). But during the eight or so hours that we had 12-18 knots from the northeast, we had great sailing, and the seas were only a foot or two. Windom really needs that much wind to sail well downwind, so we find ourselves going out in 15-20 a lot; as long as it's behind us, we're fine, even with moderately large seas.
When the sun rose we were just about at Cape Canaveral, and it's astonishing how much warmer the air was. We pulled out our shorts and short-sleeved shirts for the first time since June. I guess we've finally made it to summer.
The Port Canaveral entrance connects with the ICW through the Canaveral Barge Canal. This is one big ditch, and the area near the inlet is heavily developed with industrial and cruise ship terminals. Past the developed area is a drawbridge, and a single lock to control the tidal difference between the ocean and the inland waterways. We had a miserable time trying to tie up in the lock; the cleats are tiny and set back where they're hard to loop, and the wind kept blowing us away from the wall. I'd bring the bow up to the wall, and the stern would blow off. I'd back in close to the wall, and the bow would slide away. It probably took fifteen embarrassing minutes to tie up, and since the tidal difference was negligible at the time, we had barely gotten the ropes adjusted when the lock doors opened and it was time to go.
We continued on the ICW to Dragon Point, an anchorage near Indian Harbour Beach, FL. We're renting a car here for a trip to Disney World, since it's a protected enough spot that we don't mind leaving our boat here for a few days unattended. The big problem was finding a place to leave our dinghy. None of the marinas allow dinghies to tie up, not even for the day, not even if they pay a fee. "Oh, we used to do that, but not any more," was what we heard everywhere we inquired. We were directed to a public boat ramp on the causeway, which was exposed and unprotected, although adequate for a day tie-up. Finally, a man on a sailboat at a dock behind a condo complex told us that the condo was required to provide public water access as a condition of putting in the marina there. We found the little bit of public dock and pronounced it perfect.
One last note -- we've finally "caught up" with last year's trip. Last year this time we were about 30 miles north of here, in Titusville, waiting for a space shuttle launch.