A lot of somethings are in the water off Florida at
night. Leaving Stuart at 3:00 pm to
navigate the worst inlet in Florida, St. Lucies’s Channel, well within the
realm of daylight, and dark descended on us as we were well south of
Stuart. Through the evening radar showed
us a range of visible boat traffic plus uncharted radar blips without lights
and uncharted lights without radar blips.
We will never know what they were but we accomplished the major goal, we
did not hit them!
Until midnight we had several hours of dodging thunderstorms
which whipped up the ocean surface. The
foredeck was dropping 20 feet in some of the troughs, drenching the foredeck,
allowing me my first opportunity at using the windshield wipers and making
sleeping difficult for Bob. You could see the 80 pound anchor become weightless for moments at a time.
After the
storm cells passed, the water surface settled down and it was smooth sailing
per the weather prediction. Following
the 100 foot depth coast contour we passed Ft. Lauderdale at 4:00am and saw
sunrise on Miami. The 100 ft contour is
also the popular fishing area and many boats were anchored in the shallow water
next to the drop off to deep water. Many
of them were open boats 25 feet or less with single outboards though we were up
to 7 miles from shore. The 100 foot depth contour also keeps you out of the gulf stream that is not to much further out.
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