Rock and Roll Baby!

The depth finder wouldn’t come on.  Luckily that was just a loose wire.  Bill was over at our boat just after six o’clock this morning.  He came to voice his concerns over the front coming through the panhandle of Florida today.  We took a last look at the future radar predictions and decided it should be pushing mostly to the north.  At 6:30 he was casting our lines.  At 8:30 they were hailing us on the VHF saying they were behind us, but that we should look again at the radar for those storms.  We looked.  It wasn’t pretty, but we were already two hours in.  The seas weren’t too bad even though they were on the beam of course, but we knew it was going to be that way today.  They decided to turn around, they were just barely out of the inlet.  We kept going.

Ray predicted we would be at the front at about 2:00 p.m.  That would be about an hour before our turn north around South Shoal before continuing west to Dog Island.  He hit it right on the head.  For almost two hours we could see it.  The worst of it looked to be to the north, so we made a more southerly course to try to head into what looked to be less intense.  Soon we saw the other two trawlers ahead of us that were at anchor at Steinhatchee when we left this morning.  We decided to follow them.  For no other reason than safety in numbers, and so we could all be idiots together.  Then it looked like they changed their mind and headed a more southerly direction, presumably to go around the southern side of Dog Island.  We continued on northwest towards our original waypoint to come in at the east end of Dog Island and anchor on the north side.

We continued for three hours in the rain.  A few lighting strikes and rumbles of thunder, but they didn’t seem too close.  The seas got only slightly higher before hitting the rain when they got mixed up and then settled.  No real wind gust ahead of the front.  That was a blessing.  Another was the fresh water rinse we got.  We shouldn’t really have to wash the boat when we get to Apalachicola now.

The end of our travel day came after 81 miles.  The anchorage here at Dog Island is so calm it’s already hard to believe we rocked and rolled for twelve hours today.