Quick stop in Ft. Lauderdale

We were as patient as we could be about picking our weather window for heading south. We really wanted to reach Ft. Lauderdale in one go. I was getting anxious about impending hurricanes but we ended up leaving at the perfect 3 day window.  We had been waiting for the severe squalls to dissipate off the northern coast of Florida and the wave state to calm down to a comfortable <4 feet, any direction-but-head-seas.  Why be uncomfortable?

Calculating our arrival time was a bit of an art. The weather was horrible the last time we came down the coast and we ran at about 5.5 knots as we beat our way south. We weren’t sure how much effect current and the gulf stream would have on us. So we planned for a long, as close to shore and as flat as possible route, guestimating that we’d run at about 7 knots. We would leave in the afternoon and plan to arrive at dawn 3 days later. 

As it turned out, we covered 442 miles over 66 hours, arriving at 10:30am. We averaged about 6.7 knots. We would have done much better if we hadn’t hit a wicked current that slowed us to 3.5 (yes – 3.5 knots – even I can jog faster than that…) just off shore of Lake Worth. That little trouble spot added 4 hours to our trip. (Our navigation software gives you an eta that updates as you go along and we were averaging 7.1 until mid-way down Florida). We were practically crawling up onto the shoreline but couldn’t get out of it. We watched two other boats putt-putting equally slowly much farther out. Could the gulf stream come that close to shore? Maybe it was tidal, but it seemed unavoidable either way. Interestingly, we’d done the Stuart to Ft. Lauderdale leg before, more than once, and never experienced a 3.5+ knot current.

We also hit a milestone on this trip - we passed our 5,000 mile mark!  Not bad for our “shake down” year.

Now we can fly a Nordhavn 5,000 mile pennant J

This was our longest passage yet, 66 hours including 3 overnights. It was good to see that we did fine (albeit in very calm conditions). It confirmed the notion that if nothing “exciting” and unexpected happens, passages are pretty wonderfully boring. We were happy with our 4 hours shifts and neither of us got sea sick. I cooked ahead of time – putting a crockpot lasagna on and making up a salad. It was so calm that I even sewed a bit and didn’t get sick. We both read quite a bit and watched some tv/movies. We made good use of our satellite radio too – it’s a must have when I’m alone at the helm at night. That’s pretty much all we did other than engine rooms checks. One of our training captains taught us a system that we really like – the person coming on watch does the ER check. This way, it wakes them up a bit and the person coming off watch doesn’t have to get hot and sweaty before they head off to bed. 

The weather was absolutely perfect. The seas were minimal in the beginning and then calm as glass off the coast of Florida. It was far more calm than had been forecast. This might be because we ran so close to shore (which is why we did it…) Though we could see squalls on the radar and on the horizon, we squeaked through them all. I was on the sunrise watch so you get a few morning photos this time...

A gorgeous sunrise with clouds in the distance

If you look carefully, it kind of looks like a water spout at the base of that cloud

Inky dark nights with just a sliver of a moon when it finally rose. This was a red sky in the morning.

Off the coast of south Georgia we had dolphins playing on the bow a few of times. And I think I might have seen a whale.  At first I thought it was a shark. It was a large fin, and it didn’t look like a dolphin – too big and too dark. And the animal didn’t move like a dolphin, it was kind of cruising lazily at the surface. It was choppy and I only saw the fin for a minute or less and then it disappeared and never saw it resurface. Shark? Small whale? I looked up whales on the internet and they aren’t supposed to be off the southern coast this time of year so maybe I was delusional, or it was a huge great white J 

Feathered guest along for the ride, he was polite and left no poop behind

We saw very little traffic, especially the first 48 hours.  Other than freighters coming and going from major ports like Savannah and Jacksonville, there were just a few fishing boats and one or two sailboats heading north.

Once we got as far south as Florida the radio came alive. I hate to hear the coast guard calls. We listened to one medical evacuation take place and then an exchange over a missing diver off the coast of Vero Beach. We marked the gps location so we could be on the lookout as we passed by – it was directly on our route. Luckily he was found, alive and well, somewhere nearby in the water.

We did have one scary moment that ultimately was nothing but my apparent PTSD from our fire in May.  I had the 12:30-4:30am shift off and went straight to bed. It was a bit cool with the air conditioning so I turned it up a degree. I rolled over and was almost asleep when I smelled something “not right”. I sat up, jumped up, ran to the pilot house yelling “smoke, I smell smoke”  AHHHHHH. A feeling of sheer terror. Martin came running down – the smell was only in the master state room and it was getting hot in there – and he quickly realized what I had done. In my semi-conscious state I had hit the control button for AUX HEAT. The smell was dust burning off the heating element (we've never used the auxiliary heat). Holy crap, I think I’m a bit over sensitized.  Well, I slept like a rock once the adrenaline wore off.

Ft. Lauderdale in the morning light

It was a stunning morning when we arrived in Ft. Lauderdale and slid into our slip at Bahia Mar Marina. We’ve been here so many times – via land for Trawler Fests and the Ft. Lauderdale boat shows, and in the marina aboard both Lucky in ’09 and at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show last November on Blossom. We thought this would be a good place to recuperate for a couple days and as a special bonus, we can visit one of our favorite restaurants – Coconuts - just a short walk down the street.

Sorry for the rambling, I wrote most of this blog while we were underway and I had lots of time and little sleep…

We’ve spent two nights here and the weather is looking amazingly calm for next couple of days so we’re heading out tomorrow around noon for Key West. It will be a (relatively) short passage, about 23 hours. We enjoyed our brief stay here and yup, we managed to eat dinner both nights at Coconuts.

“Scoobies”, the best appetizer in the world, or close to it…

We had really nice neighbors at the marina and enjoyed a couple of beautiful sunsets. Life is good.

Boat Business

Blossom ran like a champ. She got a little hot under the collar but nothing alarming.

Power Management and heat. This continues to be an issue on long, hot passages. We tried running the 9k which is slightly undersized for our boat (woulda coulda shoulda put in a 12k) for air conditioning. We got an over heat error on the inverter and it stopped in protest. This happened once before on a long hot passage. We got it back working and then the 9k yelled the same error and gave it up too. So we finished the trip on the 20k. As it turns out, fuel burn ends up being the same (the alternators stop generating a load, which reduces the fuel consumption about the same as the generator uses.) We thought about turning off the ac at night but with 100% humidity and barely a breeze we gave in to comfort – it’s challenging to get enough sleep in 3.5 hour doses. I didn’t want to add hot and sticky to the equation.