Sunset selfie at Butler Island. David didn’t want to get up from his computer to join me 🙂
We’ve been working our way up South Carolina and are now in North Carolina, so that is state number 4 of the trip! Since we left Charleston, we decided to primarily anchor out, and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few days.
Anchoring at Awendaw Creek — very pretty spot, running two different anchor alarms because the margin for error is so small
After leaving Charleston, we spent a couple of days cruising up the Waccamaw River – a beautiful river where we cruised through endless trees and didn’t see much in the way of civilization outside of a couple of marinas. We stayed in two different anchorages on the river – Awendaw Creek and Butler Island. Both of these anchorages we were completely alone. Sadly on our last night on the Waccamaw, we spoke with David’s aunt and uncle who have spent many years cruising the ICW and recommended a couple of side-creeks to visit that we had already passed! Ah well – we can always loop again 🙂
Probably the most boring timelapse ever.
Some scenes on the Waccamaw
The next section of the ICW was a very narrow channel with almost no anchorages for about 60 miles. We ended up doing this in one day, which was a long and very nerve racking day. Turns out that we were cruising primarily at a -2 low tide, where the water is dredged in most places only to 10ft. This means that we spent the day in about 8ft of depth in a channel wide enough basically for 2 boats. There was one particularly scary section that I had to navigate where we were literally 10ft away from a 40ft long sandbar off the starboard side, with the channel marker about 10ft off the port side, and the depth alarm sounding at 4 ft depth. Oh my the adrenaline!!! I was too stressed out, and driving alone while David was downstairs conducting an interview, to take any pictures. Later on, we passed one of the channel markers literally sitting dried up on the sand, with the other marker barely two boat-lengths away from it! I did get a snap of that below, but you might need to zoom in to see the red marker on the sand and the green marker not that far away from it! We passed by plenty of houses in this stretch, many of which had loooooong piers down to the water with small floating docks – most of which were not even floating, just lying on the sand!! I tried to get a shot of these, but we were in 8ft of water at the time, so I was mostly focused on not running aground. It’s going to take me a while to recover from that day.
Some of the harrowing views of our journey from South Carolina to North Carolina
We arrived safely to our destination, which was an anchorage called Tina’s Pocket. This was described as a good protected anchorage – HA. It ended up being an extremely open area (with no other boats, so that’s good) and we had to drop the hook in a 3kt current. Thank goodness for our Rocna, which has not failed yet to get a good hold. We had a pretty late arrival and therefore a rather unceremonious entrance into North Carolina.
Alternate titles for this post could have included: “the week of mediocre sunset pictures” or “now we really don’t do much in towns”.
Cruising in South Carolina
Savannah marked our last stop in Georgia and next week we will be cruising into North Carolina. After leaving Savannah, we spent a night on the anchor at Last End Point. This was a great wide open spot that we shared with only one sail boat. We missed the sunset via drone, but I snapped this while cooking our dinner on the BBQ.
It was a pretty uneventful night, but would be our last night on the hook with this particular anchor, which has served us well for 3 years primarily in the Pac NW, but as I mentioned in an earlier post had been giving us some trouble in the sandy ground in Florida and Georgia. After doing some research and chatting with my Dad, we decided to upgrade to a Rocna anchor, which has a big roll hoop that helps it to remain the correct way up when it moves around on the sea floor, and we also got a heavier one since our original anchor turned out to be generally below the recommended size for our boat.
We had the anchor delivered to Beaufort, SC. As we were pulling in to the marina, I found a bakery just down the street and decided to order some curbside pickup for lunch, planning to grab some pastries and other goodies when I arrived. After we tied up and I put on a load of laundry, I headed through the deserted downtown street towards the bakery…only to discover that apparently it had recently moved locations!! After placing a call to the bakery to say that I was standing outside their old and empty location, I would not be able to pick up our order due to being on foot! The person on the phone said that they did delivery (yay!) and offered to drive our order to the marina. I added some cookies, pastries and a loaf of bread to the order and headed back to the boat. As it turns out, the guy who had picked up the phone was the owner of the bakery and he personally delivered our order and refused to accept a delivery fee or a tip. Loving the Southern hospitality! If you ever happen to be in Beaufort, SC, I highly recommend the Beaufort Bakery! The food was yummy, but I don’t have any pictures of that, but I did bake a carrot cake that afternoon :).
Hufflepuff baking attire required for baking on the boat 🙂
The new anchor had arrived safely to Beaufort, so we got that swapped out.
After leaving Beaufort, we immidiately tested out the new anchor at a spot called White Point Landing, which was basically a nice deep area right off the ICW, a half-way point between Beaufort and Charleston. We spent the day working on the boat, and I did some reading in the evening. Once again we missed the sunset by drone, but I took a quick snap with my phone.
Our next stop was Charleston, a town I had really been looking forward to pre-coronavirus. As the number of confirmed cases continues to rise, and we are more nervous about getting off the boat when in towns, we are finding that it is really not worth it to us to be paying for marina stays when we do not do a whole lot. Therefore, we have now decided to spend as much time as possible on anchor for the next couple of weeks, stopping at a marina every now and then to top up with water and pick up supplies etc. So as I plan our weeks now, I am looking for interesting and highly rated anchorages over towns to visit. We mostly only have close personal contact with the dozens of gulls that constantly follow in our air wake everywhere we go.
At least the gulls here are prettier than standard seagulls — a few contrasting white/black sections
In Charleston, we only got off the boat for a quick trip to Publix (Instacart failed us here by continuing to push out our order by a day for the whole weekend). Since I knew we will likely not be at a marina for a week, I decided to get a bit of pole practice in, building the pole on the dock right behind Highwind! We also forgot to drone video the sunset again!!! (Never fear, I have now set an alarm on my phone for sunset time!!!). We did have two great delivery meals, including another amazing Seafood feast with the best crab we’ve had on the trip so far! Thank goodness I didn’t throw away the crab crackers and crab-forky-things that came with the boat, thinking ‘we don’t fish/crab/shrimp, so we’ll never need those on the boat – any crab we eat will be at a restaurant’!
While doing engine checks in Charleston, David first noticed some dripping coolant on the white absorbent rags we keep under the motors. Some more investigation revealed the beginning of a leak from the water pump (coolant pump, not raw water pump.) This somewhat forced our hand on making sure to have a marina to get to, so we planned out the next week to get to a marina next Friday, and started ordering things. Hopefully the marina will still be open when we arrive… While ordering parts, David decided that it’s also time to change out some ancient relays in the cupboard-of-Meridian-factory-shame, so we have some projects for next weekend, it appears.
After fueling up at Brunswick (we are basically taking every opportunity, when the price is right, to fill up), we headed out towards Teakettle Creek to anchor for the night. Another Looper boat pulled in after us and anchored a little further down the creek. Around happy hour time, we loaded up into the dingy with some wine in sippy cups and the drone and headed over to meet them. We had a lovely chat while yelling from our dingy as they stood on their back deck – respectably more than 6 ft apart :). They were a very nice couple from Finland who had shipped their boat to Jacksonville and headed south for a couple of months and were now heading northwards hoping to complete the rest of the loop. After saying goodbye we drove a little further up the creek and David launched the drone. It turned out to be windier than expected up above sea level and we had a very exciting and extremely well executed grab-from-the-air landing before heading back to Highwind for the night.
The next morning, we pulled anchor and headed to Sunbury Seafood Co., a small restaurant that had its own marina. This was 8nm off the ICW, but was a recommended spot in our guide book, and they had assured us they were now offering take out, so we decided to give it a go. It turned out to be a great plan as we had an amazing feast of grilled fish, fresh crab, and a load of Southern sides. Southern hospitality is definitely a thing, since we’ve met nothing but lovely folks in our limited interactions thus far in Georgia (mostly marina and restaurant staff).
A veritable feast
After Sunbury we headed toward Savannah. I had decided to make reservations at the Isle of Hope marina, which is about 8 miles south of downtown Savannah, since we knew that we wouldn’t really be able to do much in the town anyway, and the guidebook recommended the marina. As David described on Facebook, this was our first experience of a no-touch marina landing. Essentially, they caught our lines, then placed a welcome packet and sterilized key card on our boat, then instructed us to call the marina office where we could pay by card over the phone. I wonder how many more marinas will start implementing this, and/or keep this practice once things start to return to normal…
We stayed mostly to ourselves again that night; I’ve even stopped looking for other Great Loop flags on boats in marinas where we stay as we can’t really do that much socializing safely these days. We’d had some packages shipped to ourselves, which included a new water pump and new cell extender paddles for our cell antenna.
Project time!
The water pump that David had previously installed unfortunately never worked correctly, and when on anchor we needed to turn off the pump every time we finished running the water since it wouldn’t stop on its own. It turns out that Jabsco revised the design a few years ago and it’s a known problem that they’re working on redoing. Luckily, despite it being a spare that we’d had sitting in our storage for a couple years, it was still within warranty and Jabsco provided some excellent customer service to help get us a new fixed-pressure pump and accumulator solution that works for our boat/situation.
David has been looking at upgrading our cell antenna paddles for a couple of months, and after continued connection issues, decided to go ahead and order. The folks at WireEng allowed us just to pay the difference for these paddles over our existing setup, so it was a pretty good deal.
The next day we pulled the bikes off the boat and went for a bike ride to Savannah. It was a lovely ride, though extremely hot, but when we reached the central park in the city, it was full of people, which made us a little nervous, so we headed back to the boat, via a liquor store to top up on some essentials. There were lots of cute places that we passed along the way, so someday we’ll have to come back to Savannah and visit for real! It is interesting how quickly the present situation has made us leery of being anywhere in proximity to people.
Fountain in the park in the center of Savannah
Savannah will be our last stop in Georgia as tomorrow we cross the border into South Carolina. I’ll sign off this post with a *wave* from afar to Atlanta where some of my former colleagues live since we decided to cancel our plans to meet up while we were passing through.
Our Great Loop guidebook gave us three options for our first stop in Georgia, all pretty close to one another – 2 summer-beach-resort islands and an inland town. After getting some advice from a former colleague of mine who hails from Georgia and currently lives in Atlanta, we decided to spend one night on Jekyll Island and possibly have the opportunity to visit the beach and the next night in Brunswick, the inland town, where we’d be able to do another round of provisioning.
Unfortunately, the day before we arrived on Jekyll Island, the county governor had mandated that all the beaches be closed – so we decided to do a bike ride up the island along the coast, but we were not actually able to set foot on the beach. So sad!
Visiting the beach coronavirus style, by not actually going onto the beach
One of the island restaurants had converted their menu to 100% take-out so we stopped there to pick up some food on the way home. The empty box on the back of David’s bike in the photo above was for carrying our takeout! Despite still being very warm out, the skies darkened and we even worried about being rained on as we returned to the boat, which we were completely unprepared for. However, we were lucky and it remained dry.
The next day, we headed out toward Brunswick. This was a pretty short ride. At the north tip of Jekyll Island, we had been prepared for an unusual sight…a container ship wreck. It has apparently been there for several months while they try to figure out how to remove it. They are working on building a containment net to then cut it into pieces and cart it out, bit by bit.
Capsized container ship wreck at the northern tip of Jekyll Island
The Brunswick marina was really nice (free unlimited laundry and PBR on tab in a clubhouse, of which we did not partake) and the town seemed really cute. Unfortunately, basically everything other than the grocery and liquor stores are closed, and we are pretty much trying to stay to ourselves at this point, so we contented ourselves with evening strolls, some pole practice in the afternoon, I enjoyed a very bug-filled freestyle dance at sunset, and a couple of quiet evenings to ourselves on the boat with video games, guitar, Netflix, and wine.
The lovely weather and complete lack of anything of any altitude keeps giving us great opportunities for lovely sunsets, though.
A second lovely sunset at Brunswick Marina
People keep asking us if we should abandon the trip in the wake of the pandemic. While it’s disappointing that we can only walk around most of the spots we’re seeing instead of partaking in any of the culture, we still feel that it’s better than the alternative of staying cooped up in our condo in Kirkland. So, until we start getting locked out of places to stay, we’ll keep progressing north and hope that, someday, things are safe to open again.
We knew that we wanted to spend the weekend on the St John’s river, but this particular side trip isn’t detailed in the Great Loop book that we have generally been following, so we had to wing it. I did a bit of online research and found a blog post detailing an anchorage about one mile up Black Creek which is just off the west side of the river and not too far south.
With that plan in mind, we’d been rationing our diesel for several days, knowing we had to fill up fairly soon. All of the diesel up the ICW had been $3-$3.50 a gallon, and with us getting nearly 300 gallons to fill up, that was gonna be pricey. I’d seen a “Mandarin Holiday Marina” just down the St Johns River that had cheap diesel (listed at $2.10 online), and decided that we’d be able to make it there, as long as we kept planing (going 14-16kts) to a minimum. We called them the night before showing up, to make sure they were still open, and to ask about any depth issues (“no problem as long as you draw less than 6 feet!”) It all sounded good, so in the morning, we headed straight there.
Phone photo of the chartplotter with our sketchy shallow course into the Mandarin Holiday Marina
It was a lie. Or, as we found out, they might not even know because no one that works at the marina actually boats in the area. We looked every way possible at the chart and couldn’t actually find a way in that wasn’t dangerously shallow. But we knew that boats got in there, so we just did the Florida thing and went in anyway. 10 minutes of nonstop shallow water alarms from the depthfinder later (I don’t like seeing numbers like “2.5”), we did make it safely into the fuel dock, and were rewarded with 260 gallons of $1.90/gallon diesel! We paid, crept out of the area, and got back to our regularly-scheduled safe 10-15 ft depths.
Driving up Black Creek
We continued down the St John’s River, turned up Black Creek, found the spot and dropped the anchor. We’ve now anchored a few times on this trip, something we are very comfortable with, having done so many times while boating in the NW. What we are finding here is that rather than rocks and mud, most of the time, the bottom is sand and our anchor is apparently not finding good holds in sand. After a couple of tries, we decided we’d found a good enough spot and we’d sit tight and monitor the situation with two anchor alarms. The anchorage was beautiful and we were the only boat there!
Pretending to be the only boat on the creek
Despite being the only boat actually anchored here, we were not actually the only boat on the creek – not by a long shot. It’s actually very impressive that David managed to get both the day time and the sunset drone photos boat-free, since day boaters and jet skis were driving by us from both sides of the tiny island at full speed (huge wakes and all) until sundown.
So many boats. It was like this every 15 minutes. All day.
Since it was so pretty, and we were feeling pretty lazy on Saturday, and we could deal with the rocking from the wakes, we decided to stay here for the weekend instead of finding another spot on the St John’s River.
On Sunday, we pulled anchor and decided to go all the way north to Fernandina without stopping again in downtown Jacksonville. When we have a weekend day without dealing with work, it’s a good opportunity to get long transit stages out of the way. With everything now closing due to COVID-19, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to stay in places more than a day or two, since we can’t explore towns/museums/parks, so we’re pretty restricted to either public road bike rides or what we can see from the boat. So we’re going to just keep pushing north, seeing what we can along the way, and ideally get up to Maine for some quality social distancing.
We pulled into Fernandina just before dinner time, and found that while the marina was very swank (new docks), the location most certainly wasn’t. The marina was flanked on both sides by large processing plants and the area didn’t smell too pleasant. Also, we tried to plug into power and blew the breaker on two towers on the dock. I tried to bike to a couple grocery stores in town to buy some more food, and they were all completely out of anything useful, so I came back basically empty-handed. Since the marina office was closed for the evening, we decided to ditch the dock and spend the night on one of the marina’s mooring buoys, saving $80 in the process. However, by the time we had made this decision, it was decidedly past sundown, so we did all this with our radio headsets on and me on the bow of the boat with a headlamp and the mooring line; and to cap it all off, right as we cast off from the dock, a good wind picked up making the buoy approach quite difficult! Nonetheless we got tied up for the night just fine.
Coming into Jacksonville after a long day at 8 kts on the ICW
At some point in the last couple of days, we surpassed our previous record for longest continuous time spent on the boat (on our Canadian summer trip two summers ago). Despite that, and even the current need to practice social distancing, we are still happy and in love and not suffering from cabin fever. We’ve been on the move quite a bit since our last post. We intended to stay in New Smyrna for a couple of days, including spending some time on the beach. Unfortunately we arrived a bit too late in the day for the 40 min walk due to delaying in the morning for the (aborted) rocket launch. Since the next day was a Monday and we saw most everything in town via an evening stroll, we decided to pull anchor and head to our next stop early.
Enjoying a book at the warm evening breeze in New Smyrna. Our next morning was our first cruise in the rain. It lasted less than an hour.
The next stop was Palm Coast, which was really just a half-way point for us to Jacksonville. I had a really nice run along the ICW, where the few people I ran into did not seem to have heard about the 6ft distance thing… The following morning we again headed north to St Augustine, where we had planned to stay for 2 nights. This is the oldest town in the US and has some really great architecture. And, of course, we took no photos of it, since we were either on a bike or I was going for a run. Sadly, due to trying to practice social distancing, and the fact that we were here for two weekdays working during the day and things were starting to close, this all meant that we really didn’t get to explore the town.
Amazingly we found room to keep this suit on the boat for the ONE day of the year that it would be wear-able.
It was St. Patrick’s day, so while we wanted to avoid the club scene, we wanted to do something. Also, David had brought his ridiculous suit along, so he had to wear it. The governor of Florida announced that bars and nightclubs would need to be closed, and restaurants could remain open at 50% capacity with tables spread out. We decided to go out for a meal, since it was likely going to be our last opportunity for a while, and restaurants sounded pretty dead when we asked about reservations over the phone. At 5pm, the mayor of St Augustine mandated that no alcohol be served in the city, so we had a dry dinner before heading straight back to the boat.
An interesting side effect of Coronavirus has been the social normalization of group video chats for adults. Kids have been doing this forever now, but adults have largely shied away from “hey wanna video chat for a while to catch up?” While we were forcing the issue with some friends before isolation practices kicked into high gear, social distancing has made our attempted chatting advances much more normal, so we’ve been doing lots of “hanging out” the past week.
After St. Augustine, we traveled the long leg to Jacksonville for one night in the free marina. Apparently everyone else finally got the memo about staying at home since we were the ONLY boat in the entire marina. Or possibly the marina is used only when there is a football game at the nearby stadium. We’ll never know.
A very empty 80 slip marina, and we are the only boat. Also, it was free, aside from 8$ for power.
Also we’re almost out of diesel, since we’ve been rationing to try to make it to the 2$/gallon diesel just south of Jacksonville. When you’re filling up with hundreds of gallons of diesel, these things add up. But tomorrow is fill-up day, hopefully…
Friday, we did our now-usual routine of waking up early and heading northward up the ICW, this time heading to to Titusville. This had been a planned stop for a couple weeks, aiming for a weekend day to see the Kennedy Space Center, so we got a spot in the city marina for a few days.
Manatees were all over the Marina, and we even started seeing them in the ICW near Titusville
We had an uneventful glassy morning cruise up, and upon arriving in the marina, were greeted by several manatees swimming around, and our first in-person fellow great loopers, Larry and Mary Bailey (the link is to their travel blog). They were super friendly, and we ended up spending a bunch of our stay in town hanging out with them and a couple of their friends that came down to visit as well.
After working Friday, in the evening we had some drinks with the Baileys and then we had a late appointment at an escape room a few miles down the road, so we unloaded the bikes and headed inland to find some dinner. Titusville has a cute little downtown area, but as soon as you get outside of that, it feels like you’ve been teleported back in time. Aging half-abandoned strip malls (and indoor malls), sketchy diners, the works. We ended up picking a pizza place in the mall where the escape room was and had a great cheap meal before heading to the room.
The escape rooms were interesting. It sounded like the owner basically bought plans for them off someone in Vegas that sells escape room plans, and then just built them. One of the rooms was “The Hangover”-themed, and required a nontrivial amount of trivia from the movie to get through, which we required hints for. We got through that one and since the night was still young we did another Harry Potter-themed room that was pretty good, with some neat new tricks, aside from one super-tenuous connection in the last area of the room that even the owner couldn’t really describe how anyone was supposed to understand. Oops.
Saturday was the main event for us — the Kennedy Space Center. I’d been once, ~25 years ago with my family, and Hannah had never been, so we were pretty excited. I’ve been a space dork my whole life, so the color that this added to all the stories that I’d grown up reading about was just beyond awesome. As a pretty incredibly unpatriotic person in the current environment, it was still an awe-inspiring tour de force of the era back when America was actually great. This juxtaposed with the sadness of having them sell off daily tickets to astronaut lunches at the museum, because there’s so little else for astronauts to do these days. In any event, before I get stuck on a rant, the museum was incredible. I teared up more in one day than I have in the last decade combined. If you are even slightly intrigued by space, engineering, or US history, you’ll have a great time.
We got back to the boat, and were invited back onto the Bailey’s boat again for cocktails and snacks, and ended up heading in with them all for a night on the town. We ate a pile of seafood, hit up a wine bar, drank at a great brewery, and finished off at a dive bar. Look at us being all social.
After the night of heavy drinking, waking up early the next morning was rough, but it was supposed to be worth it. As it turns out, SpaceX had a rocket launch scheduled for 9:22AM, and so we couldn’t not go see it. Saturday, I posted on the looper Facebook group and asked what the best place to see the launch would be. Most people suggested just watching from the marina, but Ferrell & Tamara Shaffer (link to their Facebook blog) responded that they were at anchor just southeast of us at the closest spot boaters could get to the launch, and invited us to come join them. So, we gathered the troops and trundled out of the marina at sunup and went over to join them.
We rafted up on them with about 45 minutes to go until launch, chatted for a while, ate breakfast, and then gathered on the bow for the countdown. SpaceX did its usual great livestream leading up to launch — “5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, Liftoff! Wait, abort! We have an abort.” Apparently some sensor measuring the force of the rockets as they build up to launch thrust detected an anomaly and auto-scrubbed the launch right at T-0. So, that was disappointing, but what can you do? It was a pretty morning anyway, and we got to meet a second group of loopers. We dropped everyone off at the marina, said goodbyes, and continued our journey north.
This segment of the ICW was a little wacky. It was a very-dredged section, so any deviation from the channel got real shallow, real fast. There are regularly-spaced “spoil areas”, where they dumped the sand from the dredging back in the early 1900s, which had turned into tiny tropical islands in the intervening decades. There were lots of boaters out there today, fishing from the little islands and hanging out under tents in portable chairs. We had to take one long cut (the top picture) that was packed solid on both sides of the channel with people fishing from either the shore or tiny fishing boats in the shallows.
Dolphins playing in our wake — they’re everywhere
We’re also seeing dolphins and porpoises all over the place. It’s pretty crazy compared to the northwest, where if you see a little pod in a weekend you’re lucky. Everywhere we go, as long as we’re doing ~6-7kts, they swim over and play in either the bow or side wake to catch a free ride for a bit.
We ended up anchoring for the night in New Smyrna, a cute little town where the only things open on Sunday are the brewery (even the smallest towns have a microbrewery these days — what a time to be alive) and a little knick knack shop, so we didn’t do much other than walk around and get a beer before heading back to the boat for dinner. We’re anchored in a tight little spot between 2 boats on one axis and a sandbar and a crab pot on the other axis, but amazingly it seems to be holding quite well in what otherwise appears to be loose sand. We’ll see if we get woken up in the middle of the night by the anchor alarm that I have set on a super tight circle…
The ICW has lots of large power line stays just a few dozen feet off the channel. It’s a bit otherworldly going through the gaps when the water’s super calm.
After being holed up at a windy Nettles Island for three days, and finally free of set-in-stone scheduled destinations, we were ready to get moving. Our next two plans were:
Get up to Titusville by the weekend to hit up the Kennedy Space Center.
Get up to Jacksonville the following weekend to then rent a car and drive down to Disney/Universal with Hannah’s brother and a friend of ours.
Early this week is also when COVID-19 officially transitioned from “Seattle’s kinda screwed” to “the country/world is on the exponential infection curve now.” We’d been assuming for a few weeks that many of our desired activities would need curtailing, but it took a while for businesses to finish playing virus chicken with each other and actually start closing. I put the kibosh on the Disney plan 48 hrs before Disney actually closed themselves, but I had some hope that, at a museum at least, we could more or less determine our own desired level of infection risk by how many things we touched/how many people we got near, so for the moment, we held onto the Kennedy plan and proceeded toward Titusville.
Our Vero Beach anchorage — sketchy shallow, mere feet off the ICW, but a pretty area
Our first stop after leaving Nettles Island was Vero Beach. We didn’t really have plans to do anything there, but on working days, it’s hard for us to make too much forward progress. Wake up early, try to get somewhere by 10:30am or so, then fire up the computer and work for the day. On the southern ICW, where you spend much of your time going 6kts, that doesn’t allow for a lot of daily distance. So, we found a nice looking anchorage on Navionics and headed up that way. The anchorage turned out to already have 2 boats in the best spots, spaced just perfectly to not really fit a third in between, so we set anchor ~100 feet east of the ICW channel and monitored to see how bad of an idea it would be.
It turned out to be a pretty great spot. A few boats waked us pretty good, but that was pretty expected. In the late afternoon, Hannah finished up her work for the day and wanted to try out the dinghy. Everywhere we’d been so far, we had backed into Marina slips, so we hadn’t actually had an opportunity to try it out since transporting from the west coast yet. So we put the boat in the water, the motor turned right on (a great sign, since the battery hadn’t been charged in ~3 months), and Hannah went out for a quick spin. She started idling away from the boat toward the channel, and then … frantic arm motions, then a cell phone call. It won’t throttle up at all, it’s stuck in idle. Damn. She tootled back to the mothership, and I started diagnosing.
Dismantling the shift lever down to its core compounds showed how much salt had made its way into the mechanism
Somehow, on the 3 week voyage across the country, salt had managed to find its way everywhere on our boat. We had most things cleaned as soon as it got to the dock in Ft. Lauderdale, but some things, like the dinghy, apparently escaped that cleaning. The shift lever had gotten tons of salt outside and in, blocking the shift mechanism and rusting some of the pivots. Fully dismantling everything, scraping off a lot of salt and corroded metal, and reassembling it fortunately completely cured the issue, and late in the evening we declared success. We were originally going to go ashore and try out an escape room, but the dinghy issues had removed our motivation, so we sat back to enjoy the evening.
The sunset looked promising, so I got out the drone, charged the batteries, got everything set up, went to take off and … red warning, can’t take off. Turns out, there’s an airport inland and our anchorage is right in the approach path to one of the runways. Damn #2 for the day. I called it, put everything away, and decided it was beer:45. So I grabbed a beer and settled in. Hannah went to take a shower, and immediately returned with the bad news that the water pump wasn’t working. Damn #3. Don’t they always come in 3s?
Our water pump setup, a Jabsco “smart” auto-flow-regulating pump
Our water pump had been not behaving super well even while we were still in Anacortes, and had gotten worse since starting the Loop, so we knew this day was coming. I was just hoping that it wouldn’t be, you know, today. So, I spent a few minutes tinkering, and decided to just give up, grab all the tools, and swap the damn thing out. An hour later, we had water again! But this pump wasn’t turning off some of the time when water pressure ramped up. I’m hoping it’s just learning, since it’s an “intelligent” pump, but in the meantime, sometimes we have to power cycle it to get it to stop running…
The next morning, we moved again. Next stop was Melbourne, which the book generously described as, “there’s not much to do here, but it has a great anchorage.” Hannah found an escape room here too, so that was our next intended activity. We got up to the anchorage, which was a roughly half-mile-square of 8 foot deep water to the east of the ICW channel with no other boats, and dropped anchor… and dragged it all over creation. We tried a few different directions, and couldn’t get it to set up strong anywhere. Fortunately, we were over a thousand feet from any even vaguely worrying water, but we really needed to get to work, so we set up an anchor alarm and started working.
For the next 5 hours, once an hour I would hear the anchor alarm go off, move it over another 100 ft, and go back to work. In the late afternoon, I got tired of this, and we found another better-sounding anchorage in Cocoa, another 15nm north. We pulled up the anchor and discovered several cubic feet of seaweed taking up permanent residence on the anchor and chain, explaining the earlier difficulties, but we decided to move anyway.
I am unlucky with airports. Also not smart enough to check the map first.
This section of the ICW fortunately has several 25mph speed zones for us to take advantage of, so we got up to Cocoa in an hour and set a great anchor in some sticky mud just SE of town, next to ~30 other anchored boats, west of the channel, just outside of the under-construction marina. The sunset looked exciting again, so I, not learning my lesson from last time, got the drone ready to go, went to take off, and … no takeoff allowed. Another airport. As my dad always says, he with weak mind has strong legs, so I put everything back away.
Later on, we took the now-working-great dinghy ashore after dark, tying up at a boat launch and hoping no one stole it (and immediately buying a 15ft locking chain on Amazon), and hit up a local escape room. The escape room was a serial-killer basement themed mission with some mostly-non-tech-based puzzles, which was fun. We knocked it out with 22:51 left, which is pretty great for us. We dingied back to the boat in the pitch dark and called it a night.
After we landed back in Florida after a great weekend celebrating David’s grandmother Marian’s life with his family, we immediately loosed the lines and started heading northwards, aiming to find an anchorage in Jensen Beach, just south of Ft Pierce.
Turns out that there was a wind advisory for small craft (it was pretty windy when we shoved off out of the marina). Most of the cruise was non-eventful, but as the sun set and we started to get near Jensen Beach, the wind started picking up in earnest and we became a bit nervous about putting down anchor for the night. We tried calling Ft Pierce marina, since they were only a little but further north than us, but they said that it would be too dangerous for us to pull in in the dark with all the wind. We then tried looking for all local marinas in Jensen Beach. There was only one, and it turns out their docks had been destroyed in the last hurricane. They recommended we try a public dock at a park just north of Jensen Beach. We turned down the narrow channel to go and check it out, but it turns out the dock was for small craft and not big enough for us. By this time the wind was really gusting and it was a bit scary to get turned around at the end of the channel which was really only about the width of our boat-length with extremely shallow waters on either side.
The ICW is the skinny white channel running N-S in this picture. It’s usually about 8-12 ft deep. You can see the water around it is ~3ft deep. We attempted to find moorage at the end of the offshoot near the top of this image.
Finally, I looked a little further north and found a marina on Nettles Island, who picked up the phone and had room for us, if we were willing to dock ourselves without help! We were very relieved. We came towards the Island just as the sun was setting and the wind was still blowing pretty hard. David did an amazing job steering us straight into our berth, which was literally right outside their restaurant – still full of people. Fortunately, as we came into the slip, several folks staying at the marina were kind enough to catch some lines for us, making the entire process go as smoothly as any of our non-wind dockings could have gone. Turns out David was the talk of the restaurant that night for doing such an amazing job in the high winds (haha get it?!).
With the winds forecast to be 20+ kts solid through Tuesday night, we decided to throw out our plans and wait it out before continuing north, since we had several nights of anchorages ahead of us before making it up to Cape Canaveral. There wasn’t much to do around Nettles Island, but we discovered Instacart and delivery groceries (they even delivered from Total Wine!), plus I took some time to do some training on my portable pole.
Quite a few people have been asking us if we are under way and if we are on the boat while working, so I thought I’d describe an average day so far on the trip.
We woke up this morning in Boynton Beach and our destination for today is West Palm Beach. So far, we have been doing all our traveling early in the morning, before work begins and before most people on the we even awake. While David was still getting out of bed (he’s not a morning person), I started to get ready for leaving.
Highwind on the dock in Boynton Beach
Once David was up, he fired up the engines and got our navigation systems up and running. I threw off the lines, hopped on board, and then we were on our way. Once we cast off, I made breakfast. Mmm, toast.
Navigation is up and running. Making toast in the galley. Yes, I’m British and I put butter on the toast below the jam 🙂
A very Floridian scene – marina filled with gigantic mega-yachts. We have to go under many bridges on the ICW – some require us to ask for them to open, including this one which was like an elevator bridge (instead of the standard swing-up type opening).
It’s getting really hot here in FL and we cannot have our A/C on when under way. By the time we pulled into the dock here, it was already almost 90 degrees! (Later in the day it got up to 94!)
Once we were tied off, and plugged into power, we turned on the A/C and got to work.
Working situation on the boat.
Then I make lunch. Today was “italian” style pasta salad.
After work we unloaded the bikes from the boat and did an escape room. This was actually our 3rd escape room on the trip – we’re enthusiasts! We escaped with ~10 mins to spare. After the escape room, we biked to a nice restaurant for dinner, where we celebrated David’s birthday a day early and they gave us carrot cake for free and put birthday confetti on the table!
So – in summary, we woke up early, drove the boat to a new location. Did normal things like make and eat breakfast and lunch, worked for the day, then hung out in town for the evening.
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