Tuesday 3/29/16
We broke away from our overnight raft up with Jumanji at precisely 7AM. Our motors cranked at an idle this morning.. what a lovely thing… validation of our mechanic prowess made the morning brighter. Better than that, we realized there was a useable wind angle so we put up the cloth and are running 5.4 kts toward the Florida Keys under sail!
The morning sun revealed clearer skies than yesterday. Sailing in Florida toward the big orange ball…. sunrays paint a shimmering path across the water up to its source… CCR blaring out of the speakers…. A 10% morning!
Winds are forecast to shift around all day, so we know we won’t be able to enjoy this sweetness long. Mike’s weather machine said the word of the day is 3 mile an hour winds touching all quadrants of the compass…. so we are enjoying it all the more, this moment in time. Jono is running around trimming sails… trying to keep up with the shifts and slacks. He and I are enjoying and learning each other all over again, what a joy.
Out of the balls and into the weeds…. As we enter Florida Bay the fishing floats are less numerous, but.. floating weeds will get thicker and thicker for the next 12 miles crossing the shallow weed bottomed bay just offshore of the Everglades. 9:50AM motoring into 8 knots true of wind, seas less than a foot.
We are as of noon today officially in the Florida Keys. We turned East up the inside passage from bay to bay heading for Islamorada just now.
Rusty here: It’s almost 8PM, we fueled up at my favorite Islamorada spot Caribe boat sales about 3PM, we walked to the grocery store next door “Traders” and stocked up on last minute foodstuffs, Mike and Laurie found a laundromat and made a final laundry run, then we met at Lorelei’s for dinner and a nice sunset. Lorelei’s is an outdoor dinner spot / beer joint that is on every cruisers visit list. We had a great evening… We had a little blow right at sunset so we scrambled back to the boats in our dinghies, we got a little wet driving directly into the building waves but it wasn’t too bad.
Tomorrow might be a sleep late / weather day. We are close to our staging point for the crossing to the Bahamas so now it’s wait on the right weather. Jono and I took a swim in the 80 degree water around the boat when we arrived. It cooled our core down and turned out to be a nice dip in the very salty water.
I’m going to sleep 10 hours tomorrow.. no need to get up and pull out early for the first time in this trip… that will be nice.
SYL Rusty