Getting Ready for Another Big Crossing

We had a wonderful three day visit with our good friends at a nice place next to Seaside Florida.

It was good to be off of Selkie for a few days to take a break from the push to get to our ultimate destination of Clearwater, Florida. We are parking Selkie there for a few weeks while we visit family and home for the holidays.

While we were with our friends, we enjoyed some of the best of what Florida Gulf Coast has to offer…on land at least.

We had a great time.

At the end of the three days, one of the couples we stayed with offered to drive us back to Selkie.

They detoured slightly to allow us to provision for the next few days as we had been getting low on groceries.

We said goodbye and prepared Selkie for departing the next day.

A weather system was moving in which was a cause of concern for us as it was predicted to be quite the storm with winds, thunderstorms and heavy rain.

The next morning we took off, and were not too surprised when we found the winds that had been forecasted to blow 10 to 15 were blowing 20 to 30 instead. The heavy rain did not help the visibility.

Selkie handled it without a problem, but it still made the ride a little uncomfortable until we got into more sheltered waters.

Our destination was Panama City Beach at the Point South Bay Point Marina. We were grateful to pull in and tie up.

Shortly after we tied up, the winds really kicked up again and started to howl.

We heard about a happy hour at the local yacht club and decided to check it out. When we arrived, it was like we had stepped into our own South Beach Yacht Club in San Francisco, except this one was full of people speaking with a distinctly southern accent.

Yacht clubs have somewhat of a bad reputation, perhaps due to Rodney Dangerfield’s portrayal of a yacht club member in the movie, Caddieshack.

In fact some clubs deserve that reputation.

However, those clubs are few and far between, and most other yacht clubs are made up of hardworking people from all walks of life from journeyman pipe fitters and front line healthcare workers to CEOs with a similar interest: Boating. I know because that’s what our South Beach Yacht Club is all about.

We had a good time meeting some people and talking to them and getting some tips on what to do in the area.

We spent two nights there.

The second afternoon, we visited with our friends who we had seen in Canada at the beginning of the Trent Severn Waterway while watching college football games. It was a fun afternoon catching up .

We then left the next morning in the middle of a major rainstorm, but with lighter winds and headed to Apalachicola Florida.

That proved to be about an eight hour trip for us, longer than we like to go, but we needed to go that distance because there wasn’t really any good places to stop along the way.

Along the way, we started to notice more abandoned boats destroyed by hurricanes in the area.

Along the way, we crossed into a major bayou in northwestern Florida. It was distinctly different.

The Bald Cypress trees had mostly shed their needles (it’s a deciduous evergreen like the tamarack trees up north), with gave the landscape a bit of a vibe similar to a wester forest fire, but the life was definitely there.

This passage was also a test run for us as in a few days, as we were going to cross the Gulf of Mexico from Carabelle, Florida to Steinhatchee, Florida.

That was going to be a 10 hour crossing.

With 10 hours of daylight, that meant that we needed to be really ready to go. There are these obstacle courses called crab pot bouys that you have to avoid, and traveling in the dark makes them very difficult to see.

The last thing any boater wants is to have a crab pot bouy wrapped around their propeller.

We pulled into Apalachicola, and tied up at the public dock. It was the same dock used by the local commercial fishing fleet.

Apalachicola is a fun little town full of boutiques, shops, bars, and a local micro brewery with distributes its wares around the Gulf coast.

The only problem we had with Apalachicola is that on Sunday night, everything is closed except for maybe one or two restaurants and a couple of gas stations.

Nevertheless, we walked around and checked it out.

Unfortunately the weather window was such that we needed to move the next day to Carabelle and stage ourselves for the next biggest crossing we’ve had in the past two years.

This crossing is not as long as it was for us to go from Atlantic City to Atlantic Highlands in New Jersey, but it was close.

It was also going to be be further off shore with no real place to run and hide if the weather was bad.

Luckily, the weather forecasting is reasonably good these days. Watching the weather versus the forecasts and tracking the trends allows us to plan what to expect with some degree of accuracy such that we can be prepared to go…or not go if it doesn’t look good.

Even so, Selkie is built for that kind of a crossing if we were to get caught in bad weather. It happens. It’s why we picked her.

We moved on to Carrabelle Florida, the jumping off point for those heading south to cross the Gulf of Mexico.

We picked up 400 gallons of diesel at a good price, then went out to an anchorage at Dog Island to stage ourselves for a long day the next day.

The next morning, we left for Steinhatchee at the crack of dawn.

More later.