Crossing the state of Florida

And so we made the passage from Cabbage Key to Stuart.  This trip was a mix of fun and stress. There were highlights that were a great time, lowlights when tempers flared a bit, and pucker moments when we grounded and touched bottom.  Final analysis – glad we did it, but now we need a few days to recover!  

The first day we went from our anchorage in Cabbage Key to Tarpon Point Marina in Cape Coral. We stopped there so we could see Brad & Lorraine, whom we met at the Ft. Lauderdale Boat Show. They have a similar boat to ours, Adventure, which they keep at the marina. We had a really nice dinner aboard Blossom with Brad, Lorraine, Sean & Louise. The marina is beautiful and the staff is very friendly. We stayed on their brand new floating docks. We would love to go there again and spend more time exploring.There’s a very shallow entrance to the marina so we planned our arrival and departure carefully (with tide levels) and Vector went ahead of us to taking soundings.  We saw just over 7 feet when we entered but swung wider on the way out and found deeper water.

Tarpon Point Marina

The most amazing sunset at Tarpon Point Marina

Vector in the anchorage outside Tarpon Point Marina

We wanted to wait for tide to rise the next day so we made a short day of it and planned to stop about 24 miles down the river at Calusa Jack’s Marina.  On the way we passed under a bridge and saw two huge yellow lifts/hoists rolling across the bridge.

As we approached the bridge, something began lowering down and we realized it was a huge crane. These guys knew what they were doing and of course it was on the ground by the time we passed through but we were wide-eye’d watching our clearance lower as we approached the bridge!

Yellow lift things

Lowering a crane

Jack’s Marina was a great place to stop. Joe & his wife Shawna run the marina and they’re the nicest folks ever. The marina is small with a transient dock right on the river that they just refurbished last summer. We were able to pull up and dock one in front of the other. Vector was at the far east end and had to move a bit closer to us as it got shallow and they touched when waked. We had enough under our keel that we didn’t touch bottom at all. Joe offered to take us in to town if we needed anything and sent us off with a dozen fresh laid eggs from the chickens they raise on their property. Mart and I needed to stretch our legs so we walked a mile into town and picked up some milk and lunch food at the grocery store. We would stop there again in a heartbeat.

The next day we were up and out at first light. We had 43 miles ahead with 3 locks and 3 on demand bridges. We thought we would stop at Moore Haven but once we got going we decided to push on the extra 13 miles to Clewiston. There isn’t much of anything in Moore Haven and the depths at the dock were a bit questionable. Clewiston looked like it had more going for it, including a Tiki Bar!

The view along the river before and after Colusa Jacks Marina was very pretty. Lots of trees and cows.

Bucolic setting

Locking

Prior to this trip, we had gone through 2 locks on the east coast – one in Cape Canaveral and one in Great Bridge Virginia (we went through that one twice).  On this trip we would be going through 5 locks, 3 rising and 2 descending water levels.  These locks were a bit different in that they provided the ropes for you. In some cases you can grab them with a boat hook from the wall and twice there was a lock tender who handed them down to you. Going through the locks wasn’t particularly difficult but it got more comfortable after having gone through a couple. I was happy the biggest drop (14 feet) was our last. We got two awesome pics from Sean & Louise.

Blossom lake-height in the St. Lucie Lock

 Blossom river-height in the St. Lucie Lock

Blossom in the Moore Haven Lock

Vector in the St. Lucie Lock

[Martin]

There's an old saying that there's two kinds of boaters. Those who've run aground and those who haven't... yet! We left the company of the second group quite a while ago while heading up to Baltimore. Then there was the time entering Lake Worth in North Palm Beach. We can now add a third time. Heading around the lake to Clewiston is done in a channel just outside of the lake "proper". While going through this stretch, I managed to cut a right hand corner just a little too tight and ran us aground. Fortunately, our previous experience made this less stressful than it could have been: Fire up the wing; thrust the stern left (towards the deeper water); hard reverse; and we're off!

[end Martin, back to Steph :-)]

This leg of the trip also included a narrow, shallow spot near some metal pilings near construction. The channel markers can get moved around by river weeds and we had been warned that there was an obstruction under water that someone had hit with their boat.  That was a tense pass through made a bit more so when a small boat coming the other way zipped past us rather than waiting for us to come through. 

Vector passing the construction area

Entering Roland Martin Marina, in Clewiston, you turn 90 degrees into an open, narrow lock that you pass through to get to the canal. We had called ahead to the marina and they were able to take us both on their fuel dock. When we got there, there were several small boats getting fuel. We had to go down a narrow channel past them all and were able to dock just shy of some overhanging power lines that were lower than our height!  We just fit. The channel is too narrow to turn around in and we weren’t looking forward to the idea of backing up so far to get out. So in the morning, we pushed Blossom back to butt up against Vector’s bow. This put us in a much better place to exit and because of our height, it put us exactly on level with the Tiki Bar. It was weird to sit up in the pilot house and wave to the waitresses J

Tiki bar as seen through our starboard pilot house window

View of the channel from the boat

We stayed at Roland Martin for 2 nights. The first night we had dinner at the Tiki Bar and Louise showed her adventurous side by ordering “gator”. I got a hamburger J We were surprised at how few people were there since the superbowl was on. By contrast, there were millions of mosquitoes, and in February!  I’ve never been to a restaurant where the waitress gives you bug spray (thank God!). We managed to watch through the half time commercials before we were too tired and had to go to bed.

Sean and the big screen

Me, wearing a scarf to deter mosquitoes from exsanguinating me  and breathing into a "bag" made of paper towel to get rid of hiccups. I’m nothing if not glamorous.

Clewiston is home to fearsome “Jackalopes” 

 as you can see J

The next day we had a day off from moving (much of our motivation for passing Moore Haven and continuing on).  Martin and I washed Blossom very thoroughly for 3 hours in the morning. (And she was covered in ash by the next day from the burning sugar fields). Sean and I took the courtesy car to Walmart where I bought cheese and wine - such the party girl. In the afternoon, our friends arrived.  

Our main reason for going to that particular marina was to meet up with a friend of ours from back in 09’. We met Richard (“Moose”) and Kathy early on in our travels aboard Lucky at our first stop – Key West.  Serendipity for sure, we bumped into them at Bahia Mar again in 2012 while we were there for Trawlerfest. We’ve been keeping in touch via email for years. It just so happened that they were traveling east to west aboard Moose’s fishing boat Eagle VI, through the state on route to Key West. They had plans to stop at Roland Martin and it worked out perfectly that we could see them. They arrived the next day and we spent a wonderful afternoon/evening with them. It was so awesome to see them and catch up. I hope we’ll see them again next year, hopefully in the Bahamas!

Moose & Kathy

Moose, Kathy, Me & Mart (and Vector)

Tuesday morning we all left (Eagle VI, Vector and us) at 9am. This was a a medium long day, about 35 miles. We could have pushed harder and arrived in Stuart but we felt a five hour day was plenty. This was the day that we crossed Lake Okeechobee and then passed through one lock. I knew it was windy and the lake was supposed to be choppy so I took a Bonine. I thought it wasteful to use a patch for a 5 hour day. It wasn’t the best decision. I was a little unsettled after an engine room check and then got so, so tired. I need to get the scopolamine made into a gel to use. (Another Nordy owner contacted me to let me know this can be done. It sounds great. I’m going to try to get this done while we’re in North Palm Beach).  

We pulled into Indiantown Marina and found it was much smaller than we’d  thought.  Martin did a great job of maneuvering into place in a fairly tight space but tying lines got dramatic as we got very close to a sailboat. I wanted to give it more space and got stressed out as the dock hand was telling Martin we were fine, and Martin got stressed out by it all. Tired and cranky, it wasn't our best docking. Once in place, I promptly crashed for 3 hours. I woke up to happy hour aboard Vector and a nice mile walk into town for an Italian dinner with Sean & Louise.  A good end to a long day.

Blossom in Indiantown Marina

Wednesday we left late morning for the last, short, 27 mile leg of journey across the state. We went through the St. Lucie lock and arrived in Stuart mid afternoon. We experienced some of the shallowest water of the entire trip between the lock and the Roosevelt Bridge. We cruised on with “.0 to .2” feet under our keel for quite a ways. We assume we were plowing through some silt, especially when our sensitive depth sounder decided to read in the 100s for a while.  Right now we’re anchored out in the same anchorage we came to our first night of owning and cruising aboard with Jeff in August. It’s calm, peaceful and pretty. We’re supposed to go to North Palm Beach tomorrow but we’re putting it off for 1 or 2 days. There’s a big storm due to arrive tonight/tomorrow with thunder/lightening and up to 30 knot winds. We don’t need to go out in that. We’ll head south when the winds fall to </= 20 knots. Probably Sat or Sun. Until then, we’re going to cuddle up in the boat and enjoy some down time.

Boat Business: Blossom is running great. We do have a very long list of maintenance items and projects to work on and a relatively small list of warranty items. We’ll have a blog post just on Boat Business by the time we leave North Palm Beach for the Bahamas. 

The only new thing that we noticed is that we have sprung a second, very slow/small hydraulic leak a few inches down from the original. We’ll just add that to the list, it shouldn’t be a big deal to fix.