7/17/02 | An odd inclination

It rained most of the day Saturday, leading us to anticipate a miserable, wet day to begin our trip south, but Sunday dawned bright and clear, the sun already heating things up as we pulled away from the dock after breakfast. We took the Intracoastal Waterway as far as Venice on that first day, sailing the fifteen-mile stretch across Sarasota Bay. The next day we left the ICW through Venice Inlet, hoping to sail to Boca Grande Inlet at Charlotte Harbor, but the wind did not cooperate until we were nearly halfway there. But the Gulf of Mexico was flat in the light-wind conditions, and we actually did some terrific sailing after we'd re-entered the waterway, gliding across the calm waters of Pine Island Sound. We had slept poorly the previous night, anchored in the tiny, hot, airless pocket of water that passes for an anchorage in Venice, so on Monday night we anchored out in the middle of a wide expanse of shallow water near the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge, and were rewarded with a pleasant breeze.

In the morning we continued past the zero point on the Gulf Coast ICW and into the Caloosahatchee River, the beginning (actually the end, as the mile markers run from east to west) of the Okeechobee Waterway. Just about midday we arrived at the Cape Coral bridge, the first (actually a pair) of the 55-foot fixed bridges we'd have to pass under. We motored off to the side of the channel, dropped the hook, and got to work.

The first thing we did was make a homebrew inclinometer out of a protractor and a fishing weight, held together with a short length of button thread (and a button as a stopper on the end). Britt taped it to our companionway hatch as even to the edge as he could get it. Note that we say "even", not "level": most of our boat systems (e.g. refrigeration equipment) are on the left side, so normally we have a slight list to port, which our inclinometer told us was one degree. That was our starting point. The clearance board on the bridge looked like 54.5, our mast is 56.5 -- plus the VHF antenna, wind indicator, and other gear, let's call it 57 feet, inverse cosine on the calculator, equals 17° more or less. Of course, we weren't really sure what the clearance was exactly, and we don't know how high all that stuff sticks up over the mast, but at least we had something to shoot for.

Since we do know our boat is heavier on the port side, we store most of our heavy things on the starboard side. Moving them across the boat -- books, scuba tanks, bicycles, sewing machine, air conditioner -- gained us another five degrees. That was obviously not going to be enough by itself, so after a lunch break we prepared the big guns.

We have two extra halyards running from the top of the mast, one forward and one aft. First we tied the aft halyard to the end of the boom and cranked it up tight, to support the boom and keep it at right angles to the mast. Then we ran the forward halyard through a shackle at the end of the boom; this line would carry the weight, and pull the mast over to the side. We swung the boom all the way to the left, as far as the mainsheet allows it to go, then locked it off with a preventer line to keep it in place. Finally, we dropped the dinghy and tied it to the second halyard, and cranked it out of the water.

Our dinghy and motor together weigh about 235 pounds, but our angle of heel only increased to about 10°. Clearly, we needed more weight, so we lowered the dink again and Britt bucketed some lovely brown Caloosahatchee River water into it before we hauled it up again. Unfortunately, the dinghy is very stern-heavy because of the outboard, and it tilted backwards, pouring most of the water out. We lowered the dink so Britt could improve the lifting harness, then bucketed in more water, and tried again. Much of the water stayed in, but wakes from passing boats caused it to slosh out periodically. Another degree...maybe.

Among the heavy stuff we moved to shift weight to the port side were our gasoline jerry jugs, filled with water for the occasion, and our one big water jug, also full. Britt decided to hang them all off the end of the boom for extra weight. "A pint's a pound the world around", as they say, so this translated into nearly 170 pounds. Of course, in order to hang them off the boom we had to shove them around and lift them up, so we were pretty exhausted by the time we got all four jugs on the boom.

About that time, a TowBoat US guy showed up. Shifting weight in order to heel a sailboat is used not just to lower the mast, but also to raise the keel, so we expected that he thought we were hard aground. But he just drew near and yelled, "How tall is it?" We guess a tilting boat is a not uncommon sight here on the Okeechobee Waterway!

Even with the dink and four full water jugs off the boom, we were hovering around 12-13 degrees. We started moving everything we could think of over to the port side. Our stern anchor, off the starboard rail and to the port. Our buckets of antifouling paint, out from behind the engine and onto the port cockpit bench. We even unrolled our rusty, messy anchor chain (the end which wasn't in use) and laid it out along the portside toe rail -- at just over a pound per foot, that was a couple hundred pounds right there. Slowly we tilted a fraction more.

We'd hoped to clear our mark cleanly and easily, but obviously that was not going to happen. Fourteen degrees would have to be good enough. At 2:45 -- nearly low tide, and what was left wasn't going to make much of a difference -- we lifted anchor and motored slowly and awkwardly toward the bridge. We carefully lined up so that we'd miss the signal lights hanging off the center, then tentatively proceeded ahead, dead slow, Britt with his eyes on the mast, me with white knuckles on the wheel.

What a relief to see the masthead pass cleanly under the steel girders! At least, we passed cleanly under the first of the set of two highway bridges. The second was a fraction lower, or perhaps a little water sloshed out of the dinghy and we straightened a bit, because our VHF antenna scraped along the bottom of the bridge as we motored underneath. With renewed confidence we increased throttle and made our way to the next bridge, waving at the powerboaters who all stared at our funny-looking tilty boat. This bridge was a little higher, and we cleared it easily. All told, we passed under five pairs of highway bridges, with no problems other than bending our VHF antenna under a couple of them.

After we passed the last bridge, we anchored temporarily just out of the channel and undid all our work. Our mast slowly tipped back toward the vertical as we lowered the dinghy, dumped the extra water, re-piled the chain, and moved the antifouling paint back into the lazarette. It was too hot to stop and anchor for the night, so we kept going, soon arriving at the first opening bridge on the Okeechobee Waterway. We hailed the bridgetender on channel 9, the channel used in Florida for bridge operations -- no reply. We called again. Sliding across the bridges had damaged our VHF antenna, we figured, so Britt ran below to get the handheld. Oops, its battery was dead. And typically, the tender made no move to do anything without being contacted, although we were sitting right in front of the bridge. Britt ran below again to find our air horn, and I desperately leafed through the guidebook, hoping the author had mentioned the correct horn signal for bridges, but no such luck. Finally Britt blasted a long-short signal, vaguely remembered from our days in Annapolis near a drawbridge where many small sailboats without radios passed each day; the bridgetender answered with his own signal blast and lowered the car barriers, and the bridge went up. (Later that afternoon we heard the bridge called, and an answer returned, on channel 16. In the morning we called for a radio check on 16, and got an immediate reply from SeaTow Fort Myers, so it turned out that our radio worked just fine -- the bridge was just using a different channel.)

We anchored in a wide spot, where a side channel gave a bunch of Florida homeowners waterfront property 30 miles inland, and watched an impressive lightning display. The next day we continued through a few more opening bridges, under a 60-foot power cable (since we're still not quite sure how high our antenna reaches, the high tension was not only in the wires!) and through two locks. The first lifted us up only two feet, the second eight feet; there's a third lock on this side of Lake Okeechobee, but we stopped short of that one. At 4:00, just as most of the rest of Florida was also finishing its working day, we pulled up to the dock at Glades Boat Storage. On Friday, the day after tomorrow, we'll get scooped out of the water and put up on stilts.