Day 210 -Hallelujah Continued… The Great Crossing

Friday, October 15, 2021
Temp: 85/68, Humidity: 59/100%, Top Wind: NW10 mph, Precip: none- cloudy & sunny, Miles Traveled: 176 !

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Here is the route. Ready or not, today was the day! The most challenging, dreaded, awful day of the entire Loop. The reason I said I’d never do the loop again, yet here I am. What! – is it like childbirth?! You forget the pain until you’re on the brink of it and then suddenly remember and ask yourself – what was I thinking!? The one good reassuring thing was that Kenny said that he slept great last night and had no concerns whatsoever. So that helped calm my nerves.

And here was the forecast for out in the Gulf. This is why today was the day. It doesn’t get much better than this on the open Gulf. Waves less than 1.0? Wind less than 10? GREAT! Let’s just hope it’s true. Those who have done this before say that they take the forecasted wind and waves and double them to get the true conditions. Well – I guess that’s why I look for less than 1 foot and less then 10mph!!

We got up in the middle of the darkness, made some coffee, unplugged, pulled our lines, secured everything, and set out through the darkness. 😳 Here is our cabin… nothing to fall over, all bottom drawers stuffed with pillows, all cabinets prone to popping open are taped closed.

It was 5:24 as we pulled away. Sunrise wasn’t going to be until 7:42. The plan was to follow our rabbit trail back out the channel to the bay, then follow our old rabbit trail from 2018 out into the Gulf – all while I shined the flashlight out and around to find the channel markers. It was nice and calm as we left our slip! Much easier to leave than to get into!

We puttered out the channel to the bay while I sat on the dashboard with a flashligh. I did not know, until now, that the channel markers have reflective markings!! I would have taken pictures, but they wouldn’t have turned out, so you just have to believe me. We don’t have a big spot light on the boat anymore, ever since we removed the Pinocchio anchor pulpit, so we just used a flashlight. Kenny would tell me roughly where there should be one, then I would scan and find it, and keep the light shining on it as we traveled toward and past it. The erie part was that the humidity in the air was thick enough that it made the light stream look foggy. However, the flashlight thing really worked! We could find markets a few hundred feet ahead. We went pretty slow, and the water was really calm. Once we heard a big splash behind the boat, and a little while later I saw a dolphin pass right in front of our bow in the beam of the flashlight! He probably wondered what the heck we were thinking. The stars in the sky were incredibley beautiful! I didn’t see the Milky Way, but I could see several gazillion stars, some satellites, and even a shooting star. I didn’t get to stare at them and admire the awesomeness of the universe for long because I had a job to do! It was only about nine miles, but it took us about an hour and a half to get all the way out to the Gulf. Then we set our heading for Clearwater and picked up a bit of speed to our normal slow cruising speed for a while.

Here’s our little pointer once we got to buoy “R2”. Anybody who has ever gone out the Dog Island Cut knows where R2 is. It is the starting point for the course south, or the point you set as a destination if you’re heading north.

The sun was getting ready to get up and help us out. It was really neat to watch the sunrise develop. This was at 7:03 and we still had over 30 minutes til sunrise, so we kept our speed at 1300 rpm. The water had a little chop on it, but nothing bad. We just didn’t want to go fast until we had really good visibility.

Captain set the course on the Garmin, and assigned AweToe the auto pilot to his duty to stay on track. He was going to earn his salary today! All systems were go, I made our second cups of coffee, and everybody was ready to roll for the long run.

Mr. Sunshine was taking his time, but it was a sky with a lot of beautiful character to watch develop.

Finally it was light enough that we cranked up the throttles, spun up the turbos, and settled in for a long journey. The water chopped up a bit more and we had some swells, as expected. The breeze was blowing primarily from the east, and we were headed southeast. The waves were coming on our port bow, so Island Girl was cutting through them nicely. We only had an occassional splash that came up so high that it got the Captain’s glasses wet. 💦

Island Girl handled the wavey water better at this speed than at a slow speed. We were set at 2400 rpm, which with the wind and water conditions had us going about 19.6mph most of the time.

It was choppy and bouncy enough that we didn’t leave the fly bridge to go downstairs until absolutely necessary. Well…. we had the first cup of coffee on our way out the channel, and our second cup before we cranked up the speed. By 10:00, neither of us could cross our legs any tighter, and the bouncing in the waves made our bladders demanding some attention. I went down first, very carefully holding on to with both hands. The ladder railing was wet with salt water, so we had to be really careful. This was some of our splashing.

And this was our go fast wake. The water was a brownish color for about 20-30 miles, then it turned this beautiful blue. Oh, you can see that we uncovered Stuart yesterday, just in case we needed him for an evacuation drill. Not that he’d have enough gas to get us to land, but at least he could keep us afloat if something dreadful happened to Island Girl.

I crawled my way back up, then Kenny went down. While he was away from the helm, I had to put on my go-fast hat and take over the windy spot at the wheel. 😬. He wasn’t gone long, because it was WAY too bouncy to go down to the engine room. That would have been way too dangerous, and he wasn’t worried about anybody done there. The water wasn’t terrible rough, just chunky enough to really bounce us around, so I had some conversations with God that calmer water would be really nice so that it wouldn’t be so challenging and dangerous to go to the bathroom. 🤭

By 11:00, this is where we were… 100 miles to go! 😳. We started going fast at 7:53. So every hour on the :53, I would announce with a “ding,ding,ding… one hour fast“ , two hours fast etc. Each hour marked another 20 miles or so and was something fun to watch for. It was too bouncy to read or do anything but watch where we were going. The air temperature was really comfortable, and the wind was mild, so it was mostly just our speed that created the wind in the captain’s face.

By noon, it was calming down a bit, just as forecasted. YAY! I knew HE would calm the waters for us!

We were at least 60 miles from nowhere, and we had a bird fly along with us for awhile! He was drafting along our wake, then around and above us. He stayed with us for about ten minutes, and we’d watch as he would dart off and try to catch a flying fish. We saw a few flying fish sparkle in the sunlight. Those things are amazing! They just pop up and glide along the surface of the water for several yards. I don’t know how they do it! I guess they have big fins that work like wings, but man, how do they get the hop in the first place to go so far? We also saw several pods of dolphins, but I didn’t catch any of them in a picture.

Remember the calm I prayed for? God did!! Would you look at this beautiful water? Yes! This is out in the Gulf of Mexico, like 50 miles offshore from anywhere!! This was fantastic! And when we were about 60 miles from Clearwater, we started to see other boats. Whew! We weren’t alone any more. 💃🕺

I didn’t mind putting on my go-fast hat to take the helm for a bit. Captain checked with Scotty down in engineering to make sure the warp core was still functioning properly. He found two very happy Cummins engines. Laverne and Shirley were just galloping their collective 660 horses along like this was what they were made for! Go figure! Everything was great. YAHOO!

We saw our first crab pot buoys at about 30 miles out from Clearwater. 30 Miles?! Jeeze! The next ones were at 22 miles. Then the closer we got, the more there were to dodge. But we kept our speed up at 20 mph and just slalomed our way through them. They were SOOO much easier to see at 3:30 in the afternoon with the sun behind us, than in 2018 at 8:00 in the morning going straight into the sun. We slowed down when we reached the channel markers for the Clearwater cut, and meandered our way in. The water was beautiful and there were lots and lots of people on the beach. Beautiful!

We gave the Clearwater Beach Marina a call on the radio and got our slip assignment. A nice man from a nearby boat came out and caught a line for us as we backed right into the slip without any issue. Then we got off the boat and high fived each other! WOOHOOOOO!

I tell you what. Pulling in here and docking on this side of the Gulf is, to us, more of a reason to celebrate than crossing our wake and officially completing the loop will be. We’re so close, that it kind of feels like we’re done, even though we won’t technically be done until we reach Sarasota. But you know, crossing the Gulf for 176 miles is not something just anybody can or will do. And as a friend in 2018 said, those of us who do it are pretty badass. And now we’ve done it twice! Some people have crossed it several times, and I just think they’re nuts. But I’ll take badass. That is not something anybody, or I would ever otherwise use to describe me. HA!

While we were out there all by ourselves, Kenny and I were talking about the Loop and the whole trip and how we were so thankful that today was going so well. I told hiim that I had faith and confidence in him and his discernment of Island Girl’s readiness and ability to take us across. He said he was confident in my weather assessments, and that I wouldn’t get us into trouble. We’re a good team. Now, we need Little Beers, and we have no Licor 43. Dang!! But actually, we were both probably pretty dehydrated, so alcohol wouldn’t be a good choice at this point.

We were both really hungry because neither of us ate much of anything all day. Just too much motion, and not easy to prepare anything in a bouncing boat. However, neither of us had enough energy to cook or to go to a sit down restaurant, so we found a nearby pizza joint. That was quick and easy, and we both crashed pretty early. What a day! We’ll be here in Clearwater for three nights, just to decompress and relax, and maybe even go to the beach. We aren’t in a rush to get home, because Island Girl does not have a home to go to! WHAT?! Truth. We still need to find a place to go, at least for a few days so that we can unload her. We’ll be working on that. If we can’t find anything long term, we’ll just find something for a week or so, then take her to Port Charlotte and pull her out of the water for a few months.