Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Temp: 82/67, Humidity: 56/90%, Top Wind: all directions, then SE7 mph, Precip: sunny, Miles Traveled: 78
🎉😁🥳😎🎉😁🤗🥳🎉
Today was the OFFICIAL wake crossing day! We knew we had a really long day though, so we were up before the sun to leave Marina Jack’s and get on our way. Today we were headed to Safe Cove Boat Yard in Port Charlotte. This is the yard where we have previously pulled Island Girl out when we have work to do on her. She was there all summer in 2020 for hurricane season. We plan to have her there for at least the next three months. It’s just easier than trying to find a marina these days, if you can believe it! It’s a long ways to get there by water, and with no wake zones it would take us over nine hours total. We even have to go through a lock to travel the last 10 miles in fresh water to the boat yard. The unfortunate thing is that it is shallow water near the lock, and we’ll get there at nearly low tide. 😳 We generally time our transit at the lock at mid tide or higher and the local advice is that you need high tide if your boat draft is five feet or more. We are more like 3’9” so we’ll just tiptoe in and keep our fingers crossed. Tomorrow’s weather is going to be BAD to the BONE with near Gale strength winds and rain, so we really need to get to Safe Cove TODAY.
The sunrise was spectacular for us! It was a comfortable morning, with relatively low humidity. I didn’t even have to wipe down the windows! We left the dock just after 7:00, with sunrise scheduled for about 40 minutes later. The city was pretty, there was virtually no wind, and the water was nice and smooth.
Bear with me on the sunrise pictures. I was enjoying what will be our last sunrise on the water for months, and probably FOREVER here in Sarasota. 😮 Let that sink in!
This one was great – the sun was absolutely golden in color. What a beautiful greeting from my favorite Artist, the Creator of it all.
There are quite a few no-wake zones between our start and finish lines today. North of Siesta Key’s Stickney Point bridge, there was this one festive house that was all decorated up on the water side for Halloween. I think this was the ONLY one we saw with decorations! It was fun that they shared decorations with the water side of their home.
Just south of the Stickney Point Bridge is marker Green 59. This is it!! This is where we crossed our wake!!
We bought Island Girl in early 2015, and we’ve always kept her at a friends house on the ‘fork’ to the left. His property is now for sale, so we did not renew our lease, and we cannot return to the exact spot where we started on March 20, 2021. On that day, we came out of the channel, and turned left onto the ICW at marker G59. And here we are! This is the first place that we traveled on this loop that we are traveling again. TaDa!
I was being playful and wanted a selfie of us at THE SPOT, because this makes it OFFICIAL at 100% completion. Kenny was wearing his grumpy pants, and said that he counted it as crossing our wake when we arrived in Sarasota a week ago, it was too early, and he needed more coffee. So he gave a mean mug for the picture. He was not feeling the celebration of it all, and that made me sad and hurt my feelers. Later I told him that it was like he stabbed a pirate dagger into my joy bubble and let all the sparkles out. 😔
It was a fairly comfortable day, with some breeze and really reasonable humidity level. These are familiar waters, but alas – we will likely NEVER cruise them again! WHAT?! That made it a little melancholy. So we kept trying to think of things that we really won’t miss about it… like having to stay in between the markers in the ICW to go anywhere, opening bridges, and all the no wake zones to get anywhere. Around 3:00, we arrived at the self-operated lock to go into the fresh water canal system where Safe Cove is. From outside the channel, we could see a sailboat was coming out of the lock, so we stopped and waited, because the channel is narrow, the breeze had picked up, and both of us would want the middle of the channel for maximum depth. Well, a couple of go-fast smaller day-boats just zipped in, right in front of us! Geeze! Where’s the etiquette!? So, we went in to claim our spot in line before anybody else showed up. But wait! The sailboat was not moving. 🤔 Uh Oh! Sure enough, they were grounded. ⛵️They had come through the lock, and immediately got stuck, thereby blocking the entrance to the lock. We were blowing around and trying to stay in the small little basin in 4’6” of water. The sailboat’s keel was stuck. He could pivot back and forth, but could not move forward. He pivoted his stern a bit, and all of the little boats could squeeze past him. We knew we couldn’t, and didn’t even want to try. We finally dropped our anchor and waited. He said he was calling SeaTow which was good to hear, because we were right at low tide of 0.20’. We wouldn’t have over 1’ of tide until after 9:00 tonight, and high tide of 1.8’wouldn’t be until 8:00am tomorrow morning. (There’s not the normal two highs and two lows for tides here!). These are small tides, but when you draw 5’ and the water is 4’6”, every foot matters!! The sailboat said that he draws 5’. Woops! 🤦♀️ Somebody forgot to do their research!! There was one other boat that was wide beam like us that didn’t want to go through either, so he was treading water nearby. More little boats showed up, and two different ones tried to pull the sailboat out, with no success. There was one boat above the lock that wanted to come out, but did not want to take a chance of squeezing around him. Thankfully, that boat called the Lock’s emergency assistance number, and a lock operator came! YAY! I wish I would have gotten a picture of what happened next, but it all happened fast and we had to pay attention to our situation! The lock operator was able to open both sets of doors! The fresh water was about a foot higher than the salt water we were sitting in. His plan was to open both sets of doors and flood water out to help give the sailboat some extra lift. WOW! What happened was the water gushed out like a rapid river, the sailboat turned to it’s starboard so the bow was headed out to the left of this picture. The gushing water heeled the boat WAAYY over on it’s port side and we thought his mate was going to fall overboard! The captain put the pedal to the metal (all 2 horsepower or whatever it had) and he started moving! YAHOO! In the meantime, Kenny had started our engines because we had a tidal wave of river current come gushing and swirling all around us. It twisted us around on our anchor so that now our stern and therefore our PROPS, were way out of the channel and in shallower water. EEK! 😬 Fortunately, the bottom is mud, and we weren’t stuck in it since the water was moving around us so swiftly. I quickly pulled up our anchor because we were all twisted around it and needed to get our literal butt back inside the markers! We all cheered as the sailboat was still moving and we watched it make it’s way out the channel to deeper water. We all told him not to slow down, but keep moving!!
This is the chart of where all the excitement happened. By this time, it was nearly 5:00 and we’d been here for two hours. There were some more small boats that showed up, so we let them go through the lock first, because they could go two at a time. Then we went in and got on our way. It was not any too early either, because we still had about 1.5 hours of travel time to get to Safe Cove through some very long tedious no wake zones. We finally arrived at the dock right about sunset at 6:30. WHEW!
During that 1.5 hours of tedious go-slow, I went downstairs and started packing things up. Kenny had called Tyler at Safe Cove earlier today, and he told us that he wasn’t sure that he could pull us out tomorrow. We told him that wasn’t a problem at all for us, as long as there was a spot for us on the dock. We can’t do it Friday, so how about next week? He agreed that would work much better. So since we don’t need to stay on the boat tonight in order to be here tomorrow, I packed everything up to take home.
We already had Mr. Lincoln (our truck) parked at the boat yard waiting for us. That took some logistical planning! Our daughter Janea has been at our house and using my car, Sonny the Sonata. Last week when we first got to Sarasota, she came and picked us up and took us home so that we could get Mr. Lincoln to have for the week while we’ve been at Marina Jack’s. Yesterday, we needed both vehicles so that we could bring the truck down here to the boat yard. So we drove the truck home, got Sonny, drove both of them down here, dropped Mr. Lincoln off and went back to our house in Sonny Then in the afternoon, we took Janea to the airport because her vacation came to an end 🙁 and we took Sonny back to the marina in Sarasota so we could get back on Island Girl. Sonny will stay at Marina Jack’s until we can go back and get it.
When we docked at Safe Cove, I had all of our clothes and food cleaned out of the cupboards so we could take it all home. There was no power available for us at the dock so we wanted to turn off everything that could drain the batteries. Since we won’t be on board and she’s going to sit here until next week, no sence keeping things running on batteries. Kenny turned off the ice maker and threw the ice out into the water. Immediately we were greeted by Allie Gator! No kidding! The ice hit the water, and she came swimming right over! YIKES! She isn’t huge, like Al E. Gator or Wally Gator, but still! All those teeth are intimidating! We were careful as we off-loaded stuff, because she came right over to the swimstep and hung out like we were going to feed her some dinner, 😳 like a dog looking for table scraps. She’s probably 4-5’ long.
It was dark by the time we had everything loaded into Mr. Lincoln. I’m sure glad that the sailboat got unstuck when it did!! We headed out, went all the way up to Marina Jack’s to pick up Sonny, and got both vehicles home. We unloaded, put things away, and said WHEW! What a long day!
Here was our long route today. You can’t really read the times, but it took us 8 hours to get from Marina Jack’s to the lock, and then about 3.5 hours to get through the lock and to the dock.
So – here is why Kenny said we were already done and why he figured we were ‘Platinum’ before today. Our daughter Janea’s birthday was on Monday 10/25, and we had her come take our picture before we took her out to dinner to celebrate her birthday. So here we are changing out the AGLCA flags. The Gold one is all done.
We had some fun posing and laughing and having fun, but I didn’t pop the champagne cork, because we weren’t technically done yet! 🙄. Right?
Then we got a picture with Janea. She had been very busy with all kinds of adventures while she was in town and most of her days were booked. We were all bummed that the last couple of days when she didn’t have any plans had been rainy and windy, so we weren’t able to take her out on Island Girl while she was here. Oh well….. we will certainly have ample opportunity to do so up in the Pacific Northwest! She and her siblings all love being on or in or around water, so we will always have company available to join us up there. We are really looking forward to that!
So there it is! Our final voyage, and our official completion of the Loop! I will do a separate episode with some of our statistics from our 2021 Loop. And I’ll try to share some info about our shipping plans as well as how things look under Island Girl’s belly when we pull her out next week. In the meantime, we’re headed off to Fort Lauderdale tomorrow to go to the International Boat Show! We probably won’t look at a single boat, (why would we?!) but we always like to look at all the other boating stuff that is there.