So, finally we were out of the yard, and Our Friend Bill could say goodbye to his not-so-cheap room at The Perry Hotel. But he didn’t have to go far, because after we splashed Jacie Sails and managed to get the engine cranked, I simply motored her up the channel a few hundred yards to…the Perry Marina.
Which, I must say, is a fine place. As is the Perry Hotel. Everyone was super helpful, and we had dinner and breakfast options right there on the reservation. (Between the drama of hoping the engine would crank after a month and the anticipation of a crossing the next day, we took a rare break from eating dinner at Hogfish Bar and Grill.)
Know-It-All
At the Salty Oyster, we had the first of the many tuna dishes we’d enjoy over the next few days, and had some voyeuristic entertainment listening to one cruiser at the bar not letting his fellow sailors get a word in edgewise.
You know how some people seem to always wanna tell ya how to do stuff? And how their way is the best and only way to do it? Yeah…that was this guy. I think Bill and I both felt a little sorry for the main victim being buttonholed by this fellow. I can’t remember all the topics he was hectoring his peers about; but crabs was one of them. How to catch them. How to eat them. How his mama didn’t like to cook them until their eyes were frozen. I remember him offering plenty of boating advice as well.
In fact, this seems to be kind of a running subcurrent of our trip. You run into a lot of cool people on the water, who jump in there to help a fellow boater. And you also run into a lot of people–just like on land–who must impress others with their vast knowledge in order to survive.
Don’t be that guy. (Just sayin’. Even if you’re a gal…but it seems most often to be guys that have this particular tic.)
There is no single product or procedure without which you cannot operate your boat. (Or your life.) And if you are one of those people who have to go around haranguing whoever you can corner about how to do stuff–even if nobody really asked you–that just makes you an asshole, not an expert.
But irregardless, as Bill would say, we had a great tuna, avocado and kimchee dinner, turned in…and then ran into Crab Guy again at breakfast, whereat he proceeded to dominate conversation with a hapless couple. (Twenty feet away, the previous evening’s victim pretended to be very engrossed in his smartphone.)
What’s my depth?
I guess I should mention the sailing part, though, right? And here we ran into a new challenge.
I had taken the chartplotter off the helm when I abandoned ship a month prior, taken it home with me in my luggage, and brought it back down to Key West in my backpack. I was able to get almost everything back to working order when I reconnected the cables…except the depth information.
I tried a number of things to try to troubleshoot, but all I could see on the chartplotter and the little controller thingie on the cockpit coaming was “-.-“. I managed to get hold of Clayton with Raymarine, with whom I ran through a variety of procedures, before deciding that it’s probably the actual transducer to blame.
We ran into a helpful fellow, Bill (not my friend and crewman, but another Bill) of Hull’s Angels, who was kind enough to have a look at the chartplotter and cables, and to ping some of his local electronics contacts to try to come help us on a Sunday. Not planning to stay in Stock Island, I can’t really use his company’s bottom-cleaning service; but if you’re going to be in the Stock Island/Key West area for a while and need bottom cleaning, zincs changed, or whatnot, maybe give ’em a call or email.
I wanted to get going, though, taking advantage of favorable weather after some windy days. So Bill and I took a taxi into Key West and I grabbed a handheld depth sounder at West Marine. (As I mentioned before, I really like Key West Marine Hardware, but they’re closed on Sundays. The guys at West Marina were friendly enough, though…especially given Bill had worn his brand new Key West Marine Hardware sun shirt into the store.)
The depth sounder I bought looks like a red flashlight, and works best when the boat isn’t underway. So it has limited effectiveness. We’ll be leaning heavily on the depths shown on the chartplotter, but it’s plenty nervous-making not to have real time corroboration from a built-in depth transducer.
Anyway, back to the marina we went (taking advantage of a late checkout, since the marina had slips available)…and a few minutes before 3pm–and 46 days since I lost the boat–we cast off the docklines for a 100-mile crossing north toward the Florida mainland.
Up The Channel
(I should probably mention, especially given the whole “How Not To Sail” thing: I don’t want to sound cavalier. I’ve run this route several times, and I felt good about having sufficient water under the keel from the Northwest Channel to Marco–assuming careful attention also to where wrecks are noted on the chart. I also have paper charts aboard, a VHF radio, and of course the Spot Messenger PLB. Were these things not all present, I would likely have not made this crossing without a working built-in depth sounder.)
Bill and I motored south out of Safe Harbor in Stock Island and turned west, past the airport and Southernmost Point; then turned northwest into…yep, Northwest Channel…leaving Fort Zachary Taylor and the Bight to starboard. (And our dear friends with the U.S. Coast Guard. More on them shortly in the podcast, you can bet on it!)
Passing Sunset Key, we were overtaken by the schooner America…
…to whom I piped the side with my Bosun’s whistle. They went on toward the northwest before doubling back toward Key West; and by sunset we were clear of the channel and finally on our way across our corner of the Gulf, toward Marco Island and the mainland.
A Core Workout
After the sun slipped over the horizon, we exchanged our shorts and light sun shirts for warmer clothes; and a couple of hours later Bill and I both started to nod a little. I had Bill take a nap for a while, and then we started alternating shifts at the helm.
At first, it was an hour and a half (or two) at a time; but by the middle of the night we were down to an hour or so for each trick at the wheel. The wind had settled a lot from the previous few days, but we had a light sea that made going below into the cabin an exercise requiring caution. We both got a bruise here and there when the boat zigged when we expected it to zag; and anyone who’s taken a cruising sailboat into the ocean will recognize the sensation of suddenly taking a seat due to a sudden bump from a wave. I pointed out to Bill that we were getting a good core workout.
Our track over the course of the evening shows a bit of a curve after the initial beeline toward Marco Island.
This is due to a “sort of” shallow(er) area along the rhumb line from Key West to Marco. I’ve been over it several times, and to the best of my recollection (don’t quote me on that!) it doesn’t get less than maybe 20 feet deep (excepting some wrecks on the chart which I avoid)…but that blue area when I zoom out just made me nervous since we didn’t have a good depth sounder, so we skirted the area.
After plenty of nodding and changing of watches, I took a blurry photo of dawn over the everglades at 6:05 a.m. A few minutes later, we dropped the hook in front of Marco Island and napped for three hours. Almost there!
The Maze
But we weren’t quite finished. The inlet at Marco snakes around a bit, and we had no live reading of the depth. So I slowly motored in, while Bill–with the handheld depth sounder duct taped to my boat hook–dipped it into the water and tried to corroborate what the chart showed.
“What is it? What is it?” I’d shout.
“Twelve point four,” Bill might shout back.
“How about now?”
“Sixty-five feet!” he’d call out.
Clearly the handheld unit had its weaknesses.
One reason I wanted to double check the depth is that I saw some specific notes about Marco Inlet: something about a missing marker…shoaling…blah, blah, blah. So basically the entrance was more challenging than last time I was here.
I tried radioing Rose Marina to get the inside dope on any changes to the channel. But unfortunately, we had a bit of a communication breakdown. As is not uncommon, in a deep, complex channel, sometimes channel marker numbering the marker numbers in side channels can restart from “1”…so the marina manager was talking about the markers immediately before the marina–way into the inlet–whereas I was asking about the outermost entrance from the Gulf.
“Stay between the markers and the buildings with the green roofs,” she said. “If you go into the middle of the channel there in Factory Bay, you WILL go aground.”
I didn’t see any buildings with green roofs. All I saw was power boats seemingly ignoring the channel markers completely.
“Are they saying I’m supposed to go on the wrong side of the markers?” I asked Bill.
I’m pretty sure “Oh, hell naw!” is the answer. (And pretty much always the answer.) But with side channels, and those funny red-and-green-striped markers, and a long night crossing from Key West, my brain was toast.
Finally, though, I realized that the marina manager was talking about the markers much further on than where we were; and that there was a major dog leg where the channel bent around an island and a fish haven (I want to say, from memory, it’s around markers 7 through 11…but for God’s sake–and yours–do your own homework!); and shortly after Noon we were snug in our slip, having already filled the fuel tank again, and ready for the next leg of the trip.
