Well a lot has happened since my last post 4 days ago when we were still at Loggerhead. It’s been an eventful 4 days with lots of new things to tell you about.
The journey down the ICW was as expected – pretty quiet (for a change) and lots of lift bridges. Our first night’s stop was near Stuart on January 10. That was a good stop but a bit rolly due to wakes from boat traffic. It’s a very busy area because it has an inlet to the ocean – lots of boats heading out fishing! The next day we moved south to Lake Worth (Jan. 11). This part of the ICW has 6 lift bridges and 4 of these bridges open on a schedule (one and half hour or quarter hour and 3/4 hour). You really have to move along to get through these timed lifts or you end up wasting time waiting for the next opening. We were lucky because the current was going with us and we were able to do 7kts of speed, making it very easy to get to the next bridge in time for the scheduled opening.
We only had one little scare that day – we were just south of Stuart on the ICW and a power boat was charging directly at us. The ICW is relatively narrow at this point and not super deep so there wasn’t a lot of room to move over. We were well on our side of the channel but this guy wanted the whole thing. Mark was getting ready to blow the air horn at him when the boat finally slowed and passed way too close to us! We got waked pretty hard by this guy but we’re thankful he didn’t run right into us.
We arrived at Lake Worth around 1pm and decided to fuel up from this barge. The name on the barge is Pickle Rick and it hangs out in the middle of the Lake Worth harbour providing a great service for boaters. We came along side the barge, tied up and then fueled up! It was very cool and super convenient. Once we’d taken on about 170 gallons, we continued slightly further south and anchored across from the mega yacht marina called Rybovich Marina.
We were up early on Jan. 12 because we had a few jobs to do and we were planning to cross to the Bahamas that night around midnight. Our first stop was the CBP office to get our final permit to proceed clearance to leave the country!! Mark had to walk a bit to get to the office while I stayed with the dinghy (for safety reasons). It was fast and easy to get the permit and we were on our way to stop # 2 after about an hour. Our second stop was West Marine to buy a new water temperature gauge for the engine (a very important gauge!!). The West Marine is in North Palm Beach. This was a long dinghy ride on a cloudy, windy day. We dinghied back north on the ICW and tied up at a restaurant called The River House. We decided we’d treat ourselves to a nice lunch once we were finished our jobs. We got what we needed from West Marine and had a very nice lunch at the restaurant. It was a long trip back to the boat (about 5nm) with the wind in our face and water too!!
That night at around 11:50pm we pulled up anchor and headed out the inlet. It was dark but the harbour and inlet are very well lit so getting out was not a problem. We put up the main and the mizzen sails while still in the calm waters of the harbour because we were expecting that the mouth of the inlet would be too bouncy to put up the sails. We were very correct on that count. We knew this crossing was going to be “salty”, which means lots of wind and wave action. The wind strength was predicted to be 17 – 22 knots with gusts around 28kts. We saw way more wind – 25 kts most of the way with gusts about 30kts. We had too much sail out but with our newly painted slippery deck, I wasn’t comfortable with Mark going out to reef or lower the main sail. So we started releasing the sails to let wind spill out. It was a fast sail but man were we heeled over and we got pushed around by the waves. Once we hit the Gulf Stream, the waves lengthened out so our ride was a little smoother. We arrived at West End before 9am and it was a very exciting ride into the little canal leading to the marina basin. We had 25 kts of wind plus waves 5-6ft pushing us into the channel. Mark hand steered us in and it went from crazy to calm in an instant. We were in!!!! It was a very long night with a minor injury to my knee and hip (I got tossed trying to get back into the cockpit after I’d gone down below)! We decided to stay the night in the marina because we just didn’t want to go back out in that weather. It was a very good decision!
Today we moved a grand total of about 5nm south to Ginn Sur Mer – an abandoned development that has a very nice canal. We’re nicely protected in here from all directions so we’ll hang out here for a few days.
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 