11/15/18 Thursday: The one thing you should never have on a boat, is a schedule. We keep looking at the possible weather window to cross the Gulf on Saturday night, and making tracks to get to Apalachicola to be ready to cross in time. But man, oh man is it ever cold! And foggy. And windy. If we didn’t want to take this coming opportunity to get across the gulf, we would have slowed down and waited for better weather. And enjoyed the panhandle a little more. We completely bypassed Pensacola which would have been fun. And there were plenty of other places that we could have explored. But – onward ho we go! I guess it was fortunate that the wind was blowing or the fog would have been way worse. With no power on the free dock at Fort Walton, we slept with no heat last night, so we had the blankets piled on! (We don’t like to leave the generator running all night.). It was 39 degrees at 6:00am… BRRR! We stayed warm enough, but getting up and dressed was done in super speedy fast mode!
Our three boats cast off lines and made our way out into the GICW. It was a nasty day out there! At least with the wind blowing, the fog was only about up to our windshields. Since when am I ever thankful for wind?! That’s a new one! I hate wind and there aren’t many things in this world that I use the word ‘hate’ with. Fortunately we have a downstairs helm, and Kenny is getting more and more accustomed to driving from down there with this crazy weather.
This was Choctawhatchee Bay. Pronounced “Chock-tah-Hatch-ee”. The wind was coming from the north, and the GICW runs along the south end of the bay. With that fetch, we had some choppy, lumpy water – but it actually wasn’t terrible.
Once again, I worked all morning trying to keep the windshield clear of wet drippy inside fog. There was thick condensation everywhere! We finally started the generator and ran both air conditioning units on the dehumidify setting, and then ran the little electric heaters to get the chill off. What a wet day! This is more like boating in the Puget Sound than the Florida Panhandle! We have experienced all kinds of weather on this Loop, but after sleeping without a heater running, this is by far the most humidity we’ve had on the INSIDE of the boat.
Parrot Bay and Bay Tripper kept getting obscured by the fog. This was another day that we were glad to have AIS and Radar to see what was around us, because visibility was only about 1/4 mile.
The weather outside finally cleared up around noon as we traveled along. This was another long travel day, because we wanted to get all the way to Panama City which was 65 miles. We were surprised when we encountered a couple of tows along the way. We don’t have this kind of traffic on the ICW down in lower Florida!
I saw this big ship in Panama City bay. I didn’t have any idea what it does, but it looked pretty complex! I asked The Google about it. “The Subsea Seven Arctic is a construction vessel suitable for worldwide operations, adapted for both tropical and winter environments, capable of operations in water depths up to 3,000m.” But I didn’t find out why it is in Panama City. That is a helicopter pad above the bow!
We originally had made reservations for a marina in Panama City. There are only two marinas that are functioning after Hurricane Michael. In looking at our ultimate destination of Apalachicola, we decided not to go the marina after all, because it would mean backtracking a few miles into the bay where the marina is located. Instead, we picked Pearl Bayou as an anchorage for the night. As with all of the bayous in this region, there were some beached and abandoned boats along the shoreline, but the little lagoon itself looked clear. Parrot Bay went in first and set an anchor with bow to the wind. BayTripper went in and set an anchor in the opposite direction and rafted up to Parrot Bay. That was a challenge! The bayou wasn’t completely protected from the wind, so Parrot Bay was swinging on her anchor, and BayTripper was trying to back into the wind and get close enough to a moving target, all while her bow was being held by her anchor chain. But they got it done, then we went in and just rafted to the other side of Parrot Bay. Captain did a good job of coming up along side of the swinging target. And Wayne has been fantastic at handling all the lines. It has been hard for me to just stand in the stern and not get into the action! We settled in and it got dark so fast that we didn’t even have boattails! Pretty soon, Patty called from next door and said that her anchor alarm went off. The wind was still blowing and it was pushing us around a bit, so we dropped our anchor straight down. Hopefully that would help keep our little flotilla from drifting about. It was going to be another chilly night on the hook! Here’s my cheerful crew having fun. This might have been after our Little Beer shots. Yum – those things warm the belly.
Tomorrow we’ll make the run to Apalachicola. We have not had any luck getting a reservation into a marina there. The area is still suffering from the Hurricane, so many marinas, docks, and fuel are unavailable. We’ve been considering a few different anchorages as an alternative, but with so many boats making this trek right now, the anchorages could be tight. We had two other boats come in here with us tonight at Pearl Bayou. Fortunately there was plenty of room here. We’ll see what tomorrow brings!