Thursday, October 14, 2021
Temp: 83/69, Humidity: 71/100%, Top Wind: SE8 mph, Precip: none- bright & sunny, Miles Traveled: 95
********************************
We were going to have a long day today, so it was a get-up-and-go-before-the-sun kind of day. The morning was beautiful, and no bugs! Humid, but no bugs. There was a lamp post right next to the boat, and there were NO BUGS this morning. Well glory be, Maybel, we’re back to salt water!! There are still a few random small spiders hiding out on the boat that think they can survive, but … they won’t. Trust me! ☠️
As we were untying and getting ready to go, Kenny was sruprised when he stepped way DOWN to the dock! Woah! Look at the water level! The tide is almost higher than the fixed docks. Eek! 😲
Not a lot of freeboard on the fuel dock!
We pulled away from our easy schmeazy parking spot and headed out into the lagoon with 47 fishing boats at 6:30.
Mr Sunshine wasn’t scheduled to make an appearance for another 15 minutes or so. It was very pretty looking east with just a light breeze on the water.
Just outside the lagoon, you can kind of see that a channel goes out to the Gulf here at Panama City. Just inside the lagoon were a couple of floating bait shops, and this one was very busy with boats coming and going. I wonder if they serve coffee, too? 🤔
We got out of the lagoon and into the bay, away from all of the exiting fishing boats, and Kenny decided to run the Girl fast for an hour or so. We wanted to make up some time on this long day, plus he wanted to make sure she was ready to run fast for tomorrow. I don’t think I told you, but a couple of days ago when we ran fast for a bit, we popped off a hose clamp on one of the turbos. Not a game changer for the day, since we have more hose clamps on board. We just shut that engine down, and he went down and fixed it while I drove along on one engine. Anyway, we wanted to make sure everybody was happy down there today. After about an hour, we had to slow down as we entered a long canal section. It was amazing that the water was very dark brown again, just like the Dismal Swamp. The swamps here must have a lot of tanins. The forest still shows a lot of damage from hurricanes.
When we came through here in 2018, it was less than a month after the massively destructive hurricane Matthew. Marinas, homes, businesses, docks were ruined, and so much work has been done to repair and get back to normal life. Yet, there are still many that have not come back, and it’s really going to take the forest awhile to recover.
Oh! And then, all the sudden, our arrival time in Carrabelle changed to be an hour later. WHAT?! Yep – we just crossed the line from the Central to Eastern time zone.
By 11:30, we were crossing the big extremely shallow Wimco Lake, just north of Apalachicola. The water color started to clean up a little bit, but it’s still a brown color. The weather has been just beautiful, with sun and some clouds. It is warm and a little humid, but pretty comfortable as long as we’re motoring along with some breeze.
This is Apalachicola. Once again, we didn’t stop 😕 because once again, we’re trying to make a weather window to cross the Gulf. I had reservations with George at the Apalachicola Marina, to tie up at the Ice House dock. I sent him a text last night to let him know that we needed to cancel, and why. It was no problem to cancel.
Then we had another 30 miles traveling in a skinny channel across a very large bay of water, and we even passed a tow! We turned into the Carrabelle channel, and found our way to the C-Quarters marina. First stop was the fuel dock to fill up for tomorrow’s long fuel guzzling voyage. We knew their diesel price was great, at only $2.85, and he gave us the Looper $.05/gallon discount! YAY! We took on 207 gallons and we are ready. Tomorrow we will use all of that, going 8 hours at around 22 gallons an hour 😳 at our go-fast speed, plus a couple three hours of our normal 4 gallons an hour normal speed.
We finished fueling, then had to fenagle our way into our slip, which was a two-try ordeal. The fixed finger piers here are only about six feet long, so we had to back in to be able to get off of the boat. The current runs all along this channel out to the Gulf, perpendicular tothe slips, so it was helping us move sideways much more than we needed. Captain got us in and we got all tied up. WHEW! It’s always a challenge to back in when the water wants to keep pushing us sideways! I’m so thankful for our Eartec headsets so that I can tell him what he cannot see from the fly bridge about getting in between the posts, and how far to go, keep rotating, etc. Putting a 14’ wide boat into a 16’ wide slip doesn’t leave a lot of room to wiggle. Here was our 95 mile route today: It says 7:31, but that’s adjusted to Eastern Time zone, but it really was a ten hour day. The yellow and white line up by our starting point is where we went fast through the wide water.
It was 5:30 by the time we got settled, so I went to the store to get some bread and a couple other things while Kenny checked in on everybody down in the engine room. I stopped in at the Liquor store to see if they had any Licor 43. We can’t make any celebration Little Beers right now. ☹️. It is a pretty specialized liquor for this little town, so I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t have any.
Back at the boat, we were both tired and it was getting late and dark. I spent some time securing the cabin by putting things away, clearing the counters, shoving pillows under the drawers near the floor, putting tape on some of the cupboard doors, and packing up our glass glasses so they won’t get broken tomorrow. When you go out on the big water for a long time, you never know what conditions you’ll encounter, so it’s better to have everything secured ahead of time!
A quick dinner, and we hit the sack. Tomorrow will be a long stressful day, and I’ll be saying lots of prayers for calm conditions, safety, no mechanical issues, and the list goes on. I’m thankful God knows the desires of my heart and the Holy Spirit can translate what I feel into prayer when I can’t even figure out what to say. 🙏
Our plan for tomorrow is to get up in the dark and make our way out to the Gulf IN THE DARK! 😳. WHAT THE HECK?! Yep. Captain wants to leave the dock around 5:30. In this time zone, that is two hours before sunrise. We’ll make our way out to the Gulf and be out there by sunrise so then we can get on with the show and go fast right away, we hope. If it’s too choppy right away, I don’t know how Island Girl will do and we may not be able to go fast, so we need every bit of daylight out there possible. Our forecast is that we’ll have wind from the east around 10knots, and waves from the southeast less than two feet. We’ll be traveling southeast, so we’ll be going into the waves or have them on our port bow corner a bit, which is good. About half way across, the wind will be light and variable, and the waves should settle a bit. By a couple hours out from Clearwater, the wind will likely pick up from the north or east to around 10 again, but the waves should stay in the one foot range. EEK! That is what I see in the weather apps, and that is what Chris Parker’s Weather Service says too. At least the weather is forecasted to stay calm until late Saturday afternoon, so if by some awful chance we have issues and have to slow down and go slow and be out there longer than we plan, we have an extra 24 hours of good weather ahead of us. In fact, Saturday’s conditions still look a bit better than tomorrow, but if the windy weather front speeds up, or if we have any issues at all, we’d be in a really bad spot. So that’s why we hustled our boat booty to get here today, to make a Friday crossing for the safety.
We won’t have cell service out there, and we’ll probably be exhausted after we get to Clearwater, after the exhilaration of being there wears off. So I’ll let you know when we make it so you won’t be hanging by a spider’s thread, but the complete story will likely be delayed. 😉