- 91.09 NM
- 14h 35m
- 6.4 kts avg speed
Thanksgiving Day. And what would turn out to be the final leg of our cruise to rescue Jacie Sails.
We said goodbye to The Bonds and let them get to their Thanksgiving preparations around 9:20, after a fine breakfast; and I piped the side with the bosun’s whistle after doing a standing turn in the canal and pulling away. We were waiting for the tide to come up a little from the 7:00 a.m. low, since the mangrove channel to exit from the neighborhood showed a depth of 4 feet at Mean Low Lower Water. (I really should learn exactly what that means.)
We crept carefully out from the Punta Gorda canal into the mangrove, to the bemusement of some fishermen in some kinda motorboat.
“Sorry!” I shouted, as they reeled in their lines so we could pass. “First time here! I guess we’ll see how this goes…”
I alternated between forward and neutral so we’d make only about a knot of forward speed. I had Bill stand on the steps inside the companionway so I could see through the rolled-up center span of the dodger. The other eisenglass windows were still crazed from whatever sun and weather Jacie Sails experienced while drifting around the Keys for a month.
We managed to not take any bottom samples, and by 9:50 we were out of the channel, and turning south down Charlotte Harbor toward Boca Grande.
Git ‘r dun!
I’d floated the idea of stopping at Venice this evening, so we’d have two reasonable daysails back to Jacie‘s home marina; but I reversed course after thinking about the weather: very calm today, but with a north wind starting at 3 a.m. Cold and on the nose. Not what I like.
“Maybe we can duck into the Crow’s Nest [in Venice] to pick up some celebration beers or something,” I told Bill. “But I think we should get back to the barn tonight.”
“How long will it take?” he asked. (I think Bill was definitely partial to the two-day plan.)
“Maybe 16 hours? But a lot more than that in total if we don’t go straight on.”
“Whatever you say, Cap!” said Bill. But I strongly suspect he was muttering under his breath.
I’d broken some news to Bill the day before:
“I don’t think we’re actually gonna be doing any sailing on this trip.”
We had already spent more time in the boatyard than I’d anticipated, and Bill had booked a flight home from Tampa on Sunday. I’d booked a How Not To Sail meetup for Saturday night. And although things had been pretty smooth so far, I had this intimation that I shouldn’t push my insanely good luck. After all, one does not usually find one’s boat, intact and in good shape, after said boat being missing for over a month.
So I’d put on the sail covers before we pulled up to The Bonds’ place, to look a little more presentable; and now I made the call to press on all day and into the evening, so (hopefully) we could have some wiggle room in case of snafu.
One Foot On Shore
So far, it looked like the right call.
We motored south down the bay on very calm water, and saw more dolphins than boats. Bill actually managed to get a video clip of one in the distance, which is quite something: usually the little bastards scuttle off when you whip out the smartphone.
Given the flat conditions and the rising tide, I made another call:
“I’m gonna try the swash channel.”
This is where our crack legal team reminds me that under no circumstances should you take navigational advice from me…which this is most certainly not.
As I alluded to in Episode 4 of the podcast, a couple of the major inlets in Southwest Florida have an official entry, with shoals on either side…and also a “swash channel”—which tends to be on the north side of the channel, close to shore. There may or may not be one at Egmont Channel, and there may or may not be one at Boca Grande. And we may or may not have been heading for the latter. (Although our crack legal team urges me not to say this.)
The whole reason for taking the swash channel at Boca Grande would be to cut off almost an hour of sailing a southwesterly curve for over two miles before you can head north. But I’ll also note that taking another hour beats grounding your boat and possibly getting pounded in the swells near shore!
I’ve transited the channel probably 8 times in the last few years…and today we had almost flat calm and a rising tide. So that’s a good thing.
On the other hand, the “pucker multipliers” were: (a) Hurricanes Helene and Milton could have shifted things around entirely; and (b) we didn’t have a decent depth sounder. We had a chartplotter at the helm that showed what the depth was supposed to be—before the last two hurricanes—but no instrument to confirm it.
“Prepare for Rapid Unscheduled Deceleration!” I called out as we approached the squat historical lighthouse on Boca Grande…and turned toward the beach.
Once again, recreational boaters were perplexed. I passed close to one boat, just puttering around with a family aboard, hoping they might move their ass, since they had a forgiving 2-foot draft and we did not. They drifted across our bow and I didn’t have to invoke the Law Of Gross Tonnage.
This is where our crack legal team reminds me that there is no “Law Of Gross Tonnage“…although if it comes down to it, you should probably give way to a more massive vessel if they are stubbornly sticking to their course.
We passed so close to the ruined concrete pier that we could have tossed fish to the pelicans. Between the motorboats and the shore. The few people on the beach stared at us. I stared at the chartplotter. Bill took photos of the pelicans and the lighthouse.
And then we were clear. I brought the RPMs back up.
“Easy, peasy!” Bill might have said, were I making up dialogue for him.
Press On
The decision (in this case) worked out. In fact, I’d had ridiculously good luck with Jacie for weeks now.
Not only had the house batteries come back up after a month adrift. Not only had the Yanmar diesel engine run as smoothly as ever—if not smoother—after running her out of fuel and a month adrift. But also, in the middle of the night on our first leg across the Gulf…the rotary cabin light which had been dead for several years suddenly lit up.
But we weren’t done. The last day or so of flukey, weak winds worked some magic; and after clearing the swash channel, Our Friend Bill and I were treated to maybe one of the glassiest seas I’d even seen on the Gulf.
So glassy, in fact, that I let Bill monitor the autohelm (and crab pots, of course), while I set up the cabin table and did some writing. (Probably one of the earlier blog posts from this series, in fact.) A photo from mid-afternoon off Stump Pass shows me, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat (a “semi-sombrero”) and typing on the laptop, with a completely smooth sea to either side.
Whither Venice?
My decision to bypass Venice looked even better when we motored by, a couple of miles offshore, around 4:45 in the afternoon.
I scanned the inlet with binoculars and with my bare eyes…and nothing I saw made sense. I’d been into Venice a number of times (including on my trip south before Milton), and the patterns and shapes I was seeing just didn’t match anything in my brain.
Then it occurred to me: Milton made landfall in Siesta Key, just a few miles north of Venice, with winds of 120 mph. And Venice was on the bad side of the eye. The proof is in the news photos of airplanes flipped upside down at Venice airport, and buildings with sand up to the top of the first floor.
As Bill and I passed the binoculars around, all we could see while looking down the channel seemed to be a large two-story house at the end…which we could see through. It appeared to be nothing but framing. I thought I saw some barges or something around Snake Island, but I couldn’t be sure.
I didn’t spot anything that looked like Crow’s Nest Marina, where I stopped on the way down to nap and scavenge around in a taxi for fuel, but I see from some online photos they appear to have made it through—so apparently I was just confused by all the mess. I remember helping to carry some plywood for the folks boarding up the restaurant and bar, and was grateful for them letting me use the “facilities” before those were boarded up, too.
But irregardless, as Bill would say, we pressed on; and I hope to visit Crow’s Nest again soon.
Home At Last (Not just a great Steely Dan song.)
So we pressed on, passing Longboat Pass around 8pm. By this time, the sea was no longer glassy, just more like “normal.” But we were spoiled after motoring in a flat calm all day. (Hey, I know it ain’t sailing…but if you’re gonna have to motor, it might as well be as calm as possible.)
Since we didn’t have any live depth confirmation of what was on the chart, we swung out wide of the Egmont shoals (I tried to keep us in 20′-30′ of water most of the day), crossing the shipping channel at 10pm, before turning back NE toward the Pass-a-Grill entrance.
Perhaps one disappointing thing about motoring straight through is that we wouldn’t have the “21 gun salute” I’d been imagining for days. I had in my mind a picture of us returning to the marina to the accompaniment of air horns, whistles, and many alarums and huzzahs. This would be neither possible nor appropriate near midnight; but I did message our friend Peter on Pier 5, who’s more of a night owl than most. And I gave The Admiral the link to the marina cam in case she wanted to look it up, late on a Thanksgiving Day evening.
And so it was, after over a week in the boatyard and a 272-nautical-mile cruise, we motored into the marina just a couple of minutes before midnight on Thanksgiving Day. And even though Peter was standing on the pier to welcome us and The Admiral was monitoring the marina cam, I managed to glide into the slip like I knew what I was doing.
