Charleston to Stuart, FL

We’re getting closer to home, one passage at a time, one storm at a time!

While we love Charleston, we'd spent a rainy week there and were itching to move on. I’d been glued to the weather and there were early warnings of a possible tropical disturbance developing in the Gulf later in the week. So we decided we should leave and get further south even if the conditions were a bit bumpy. And they were! We left Monday morning and pushed through beamy/head seas – conditions which make Blossom hobby horse. Conditions varied over the 52-hour passage as we crept along the coast with it calming down significantly the last 8 hours or so. No one got sick though and having 8 hours to rest between shifts was a God-send. I even managed to take a shower and only bruised one side of my body 😉

A Brown Boobie took a rest on our bow the first evening. He spent an hour grooming his feathers and I think he was planning on spending the night. Unfortunately, we turned a bit east and it got too bumpy for him to hold on.

Very pretty bird

When we left, we weren’t really sure where we’d be stopping, just that we wanted to make it to Cape Canaveral or further south.  We decided to stop in Stuart though we probably could have gone another half day to Ft Lauderdale. Part of the reason we stopped in Stuart is that we’re eyeing Lake Okeechobee. It’s possible to cut through the state through the lake if it’s high enough. That would cut our trip short by about 250 miles and we wouldn’t need to wait for the seas to calm down after the storm… It looks like we might have made the right decision – the lake has been coming up every day and central Florida is looking at getting 6-10 inches of rain over the long weekend. (Yikes!)

Sunset Bay Marina had a slip available for us which was great – I was worried it would be hard to get a slip over the holiday weekend. I think we got lucky as the marina is pretty darn full! It’s weird being back in Stuart – we lived here for 7 months back in 2014 while commissioning Blossom and haven’t been back since. We ended up arriving at dead low tide and were warned off passing through the crossroads area of the ICW. So we dropped anchor and waited for the tide to come in. After chatting with Sea Tow and a couple boats passing by we decided to drop Petal and do some sounding.

Martin and Jim checking depths

By now it was mid-tide rising and the guys saw plenty of water. We passed through with 1.5 under the keel at it’s shallowest. Boating in Florida is an exercise is navigating shallow water!

Going through the Roosevelt Bridge – just ahead of some wet weather!

We’ve never stayed at Sunset Bay though we’ve eaten at the restaurant there several times. It’s a pretty marina and it’s just a 5 minute walk into the cute downtown area from there. We pulled in to a dock filled with Nordhavns and Krogans and bumped into our water maker technician and later, the commissioning manager who commissioned Blossom.

As usual, we're enjoying one of our favorite aspects of cruising - the community! We passed by a Nordy on our way down here from the west coast of Florida and had a great chat on the radio. Then we met an awesome couple on another Nordy here at Sunset and found we had a number of cruising friends in common... It's such a small community of friendly, interesting people!

We’re happy to be here and able to ride out the weekend in comfort. The storm has in fact developed into a subtropical storm and is currently the first named storm of the season - Alberto. Hopefully it won’t strengthen beyond a Tropical Storm before it hits landfall on the northern Gulf coast. With crazy rainfall expected throughout Florida, we’re assuming the lake will be nice and deep by early next week when we hope to cross.

Boat Business:

• Our 9k gen died on the passage down. Martin found that a breaker had failed. The same thing happened in 2014 so we had a spare.
• Jim replaced the filters in the air handlers and sneezing seems to have lessoned on board. I’m still finding yellow dust in nooks and crannies…