EC2012 - Day 2

Everglades Challenge 2012


Sunday, March 4, 2012


No IHOP this morning... We were woken up at about 2AM by a light rain.  The wind was still out of the south but we had been sleeping for a while, so we decided to give it another go.  The conditions were not any better, so we ended up sailing exactly one tack.  We ended up about a mile further down Sarasota Bay, near Bishops Point.  We settled in for another nap and woke up again at about 5AM.  The wind still had not changed, but we didn't feel like waiting around anymore, so I started pulling the boat along the shore.  About half a mile later we walked past Wally and Badger who were tied up along the mangrove.  We chatted for a while, then just after 6AM noticed that the wind had started to shift.    We decided to go for it and hopped in.


The wind was now NW at 20+ mph with gusts close to 40 mph.  Our sail was still double reefed down to about 30 square feet and we were routinely hitting 10mph.  We had a few highlights:

• "Sailboat Slalom" through the moored boats outside of the Sarasota Sailing Squadron.  These big boats were tugging at their moorings and the wind was howling in their rigging.  We sailed straight through the middle of the field of boats being very careful to not hit any of them or catch their mooring lines.

• Sailing under the John Ringling Causeway hitting 12.8mph surfing a large wave.  My boat's new max speed :)

• Not hitting the Siesta Drive bridge.  We misread the chart while approaching the bridge and though the vertical clearance was 18 feet, which meant we would need to drop out mast.  Unfortunately, there was nowhere to beach the boat and the wind was steadily pushing us towards the bridge through some very nasty chop generated by the waves reflecting off the seawalls.  Just when we though we were going to hit the bridge, we drifted nicely underneath with plenty of clearance.  Checking the chart again, we realized that we had looked at the wrong bridge and this one was 25 feet.  Whew...

The rest of the trip to CP1 was less eventful.  We had the drop our mast to get under a few bridges and while nearing the Blackburn Point Bridge we noticed Stripbuilder up on a bluff waving down at us.  He showed his his excellent campsite tucked between a fence and some mangrove... very stealthy :)

We continued south through Venice and saw DonKeyHoTeh and MicroTom beached on Snake Island.  The sail though the canal was fast but uneventful.

We arrived at CP1 at about 2:30PM and enjoyed some delicious hot dogs thanks to PaddleDancer and Etchimen, thanks!  We dried out some stuff, filled our water and rested a bit.  After discussing plans with some other Watertribers, we decided to head towards Hoagen Key to camp for the night.  We passed a few others as we were paddling back out:

Stripbuilder

Lugnut and Karank

After clearing the Placida bridge, we put the mast back up and set a straight line course to Hoagen Key.  This worked great until we hit a mud bank.  We dragged the boat around the obstacle and finished our day.  Hoagen Key is maintained by fellow Watertriber, Tyro and the Florida Paddle Trail Association.

We found a nice spot out of the wind, ate some dinner and settled down for a good nights sleep.