4.6 – Saturday

It’s the weekend and we’re traveling down the Florida coast. Today started out with a nightmare of tiny boats. First we were prepping to transit a bascule bridge – little boats don’t care if the bridge is opening, they just go through! Right of way? What does that mean!?

Just past the bridge in New Smyrna Beach, Kyle was trying to figure out which channel he was supposed to be in, and as he was trying to make the correct turn, a wave of boats came toward him – it looked like a scene out of Waterworld!

Other than that, it was a long boring trip through something called Mosquito Lagoon, then a narrow cut over to the bay around Titusville (Cape Canaveral). Nothing terribly interesting, except the biggest building in the world! (Okay, one of the largest buildings in the world by volume.) As you can see in the photo, this building appears to be at least half an inch tall, but it is five miles away from our anchorage so it’s probably a little taller than that.

4.7 – Sunday

You get a basic feel for how your bridge transit will go based on how the operator answers the radio.

“Memorial Bridge, Memorial Bridge, this is the southbound catamaran Hobbes.”
“This is Memorial Bridge, keep it coming Captain, and we’ll have the bridge open when you arrive.”
Perfect! A bridge tender who’s helpful and communicative!

“George Musson Bridge, George Musson Bridge, this is the southbound catamaran Hobbes.”
“Ya?”
Really hoping it was the bridge tender who said that, and not some random dude with a radio.
“Um…we’d like to request transit at your next opening”
“Where are you?”
We’re literally the only catamaran you can see right now. There are no visual obstructions, we’re very obviously the only boat in the vicinity that might want a bridge opening.

There is hardly any tide here – maybe about a foot? – so we haven’t had strong currents, which makes bridges pretty  straightforward.

4.8 – Monday

Another boring day, although there was more scenery today. We had one stretch where the water turned teal and gorgeous. I was driving into a dark cloud so I was getting rain gear on, but I asked Kyle to take pictures of the Nina and the Pinta as they passed by! We could tell it was the Nina and the Pinta because they showed up on AIS, just like when Columbus sailed in 1492.

The forecast was calling for a little rain this afternoon, but a lot of rain and wind tomorrow. We’re looking for a protected anchorage tonight and we’ll probably just stay put tomorrow.

4.9 – Tuesday

Sometime during the night a monohull anchored about ten feet away from us. I know we’re going to have to get used to people anchoring too close, but this anchorage is WIDE open. There’s so much space. There’s no need for him to be right on top of our anchor.

We took today off, which was pretty amazing. Kyle got a ton of projects done (as always!). We smoked poppers and chicken. Kyle rigged up the automatic bilge pump and pumped out the rudder compartments.

We thought we had that problem fixed when we filled in the damage hole, but now that it’s full of water again we’re doing more investigation. I will just skip to the ending here: there are lockers underneath the floor of the cockpit. There are no bulkheads in between those lockers and the rudder compartments, so whenever it rains, or whenever we take a wave into the cockpit, if the water drains into the floor lockers it’s probably running right over to the rudder compartments. We will have to stay on top of this, and now that we have an electric pump it is very easy to drain them.

4.10 – Wednesday

We only had to cover 30 miles today, but we had six opening bridges – welcome to the Florida coast ICW! Six bridges in that short of a stretch means the second you get through one bridge, you need to start preparing for the next one, making sure you have the bridge name, the VHF channel, and their opening schedule. I don’t know what it is with Florida bridges, but they open SO SLOWLY.

There was one crazy stretch where the water became super clear, it was 15 ft deep and I could clearly see the bottom. I was dancing around, exclaiming about it, and finally Kyle had me take the helm for a couple minutes so he could check it out too. It was a good thing he did, because almost instantly it all turned black again.

We’re now anchored in Lake Worth (West Palm Beach) with about seven thousand other boats. I’ve never seen an anchorage so full, but there’s still plenty of space for more boats. This is our jump off point for the Bahamas! This is actually happening!

We didn’t do a great job of passage planning last time we jumped offshore, so now we’re getting smarter about it. We looked at weather routing services like FastSeas and PredictWind. It looks like we’re going to be sitting here and waiting for quite a while, as there is no good crossing weather yet.