Day 127, Year 10: Happy Valentine’s Day
Date: Saturday, February 14, 2015
Weather: Beautiful and Sunny, High Temp mid-60’s F, Winds NW 10-15
Latitude: 25 53.448 N
Longitude: 081 42.924 W
Location: Anchored South of Caxambus Pass, Marco Island, FL
It was time to leave the mooring this morning but Mark said, “Not until you look behind you.” I looked back and there was a huge Valentine banner. This was the same banner that he hung in the trees outside my first grade classroom in the early 1990’s. My thought then was that I was sure it was going to get me fired. My thought this morning was, “How in the world did that banner get here?” I had no idea it still existed, and certainly had no idea it was on this boat. But it made my day. Happy Valentine’s Day to all! And I hope you had some Valentine surprises of your own.
Our Valentine’s Day was spent motor sailing from Fort Myers Beach to just south of the Caxambus Pass on Marco Island. It was a fairly calm motor sailing day with 5-10 knot winds directly behind us . . . again. Mid-afternoon the wind started to pick up to 15-20. This was not predicted in any of our weather information and the strong winds are giving us a rough ride tonight. We are anchored just south of the Caxambus Pass on Marco Island. We are anchored, but it is not a designated anchorage. We simply pulled off in a ‘wide spot in the road’. Are we in a safe anchorage with these unexpected strong winds? Probably, hopefully. Are we in a comfortable anchorage? No, and that’s an emphatic no. I do believe it will be the roughest night at anchor we have spent in many a year. And it seems to be getting rougher as the evening goes on. We have never just pulled over and anchored before, but we didn’t feel like we had much of a choice. The only anchorage we can get into between here and Fort Myers Beach is Naples and if we stopped there, we would not get to Marathon in the Keys until Tuesday. By pushing further south today, we will get there on Monday as our only other stop will be in the Little Shark River in the Everglades tomorrow night. I won’t go into all of the weather details, but the bottom line is that Mark didn’t really sleep very well last night due to worry over this return trip to the east coast of Florida. The weather is just not right for any leg of the trip and even if we lay over during the really windy days, after that we would have strong winds on the nose. So last night it looked like a lose/lose proposition. But I spent a great deal of my day today continuing to document the winds in various locations every three hours for the next seven days. Then I made a list of the days and the general wind speed and direction for that day and night. Next I recorded the direction we would be traveling from point to point. After all of this, it became evident that we really have only one safe choice. Soooooo . . . we are going to get to Marathon in the Keys on Monday afternoon and keep going overnight reaching Key Biscayne just south of Miami on Tuesday. This will get us in before the next cold front brings the higher winds. We don’t mind 25 knot winds when we are out at sea, but in the shallow Hawk Channel we are just not sure how rough it might get. And there really aren’t any good places for us to anchor in that kind of wind. Lee and Lynda think they will get to Marathon and then go the inside route back to Key Biscayne after spending a few nights in a marina they discovered when they did their explore on the inside on our way south through the Keys. Now we just have to survive this rocky, rolly night.
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| 150214 Day 127 Florida, USA–Fort Myers Beach to Marco Island |
