Stuart to St Pete

Storms over Stuart

We ended up having a great few days in Stuart. One of the highlights was a visit from friends, Todd and Mai, whom we met several years ago on a dive trip in Indonesia. Over the years we’ve kept in touch on FB and have both moved from CA to FL. It was wonderful to reconnect!

Originally, we’d thought that we would stay in Stuart until Tuesday or Wednesday, letting Alberto clear through, the wind/seas calm down, and the lake come up – then we could decide whether we’d go through or around Florida to get home. But then we had a very serendipitous encounter and we found ourselves fleeing Stuart on very short notice!

Sunday evening Martin and I took advantage of 20 minutes of rainlessness to enjoy a brief happy hour on the flybridge. While up there, some folks came walking by and introduced themselves – they were from St Pete and one gentleman, Mark, is a friend of Jim’s as well. We got to talking and he told us that he’d just come through the lake and that there was plenty of water but that there’s a railroad bridge on the east side of Lake Okeechobee that’s going down for repairs. He was told that passage through would be challenging to impossible over the next couple of weeks. Whoa!! I’d read on the Waterway Guide that the Ortona Lock was undergoing repairs in a week or so and would be down but we still had plenty of time to get through before that. I’d heard nothing of the Indiantown RR bridge.

Monday morning we called the bridge and sure enough, we were told to “come through today or be prepared to wait hours to try to get through once work starts on Tuesday”. Yikes.  Martin and I aren’t the best at spontenaity, we like to have a plan and try to stick to it which, unfortunately, doesn’t work well with boating in general. But we managed to come to a decision and act quickly – it was helpful to have Jim with us too! We wanted a mid to rising tide while going up to the Stuart Lock and it happened to be high tide when we made the decision to go so we had to act fast if we wanted to catch a falling highish tide. We managed to return a rental car, check out of the marina and cast off within 45 minutes – we’re so proud!

The rest of day couldn’t have gone better! We made the first lock just as it’d released folks to the east side and passed right through -raising up 14.6 feet

Entering locks

Unhappy reptile in the lock!

Then we got to the infamous RR bridge and it was open so we passed through there. Indiantown Marina wasn’t responding to phone calls or the VHF so we figured we’d tie up to the dolphins at the Mayaca Lock. We got there around 3:00 and they were just locking a few boats through coming east. It was pretty blowy but we figured we could push on and make it to Roland & Mary Martin’s Marina before nightfall so decided to keep going through Lake Ochechobee. And the lake was dis.gust.ing. It was pretty windy and as NOAA said, it was “moderately choppy”. We had, quite literally, black water spraying up over the bow and all over the boat for a few hours. B needed a good rinsing when we got in. Amazingly, it didn’t rain one bit the entire day which we were happy for – we’d been worried that we could have gotten hit with a squall that day.

Looked like a big ol’ milkshake!

We arrived at Roland Martin’s around 6:30 and tied up to the dock. After attending to Blossom for a bit (nasty dirty) we cleaned up and enjoyed dinner at the restaurant there.

No, none of us had the gator for dinner 😊

This morning we awoke to welcomed, sunny blue skies, it was nice to have the break. We weren’t sure where we’d stop for the day, again, thinking we could pick River Forest, La Belle, Calusa Jack’s or Ft Myers depending on our speed, weather and dockage availability.

River Forest

We played a sort of “eye spy” game as we cruised along through Florida. Our tally was: 1 hawk (who flew very close by the boat and was gorgeous), several cows, herds of horses + a donkey, 1 bald eagle, several osprey, anhingas, 2 raccoons, 1 wild turkey, 2 turtles, 2 manatee, 1 live gator sunning, 1 live gator swimming, and 1, I kid you not, enormous headless gator body being eaten by half a dozen buzzards!!  It must have been killed by a propeller?  

Ft Myers

We made incredible time and found ourselves arriving into Ft Myers around 5:15pm. The municipal marina had space for us so we decided to stay there for a night or two. The marina is right next to downtown and we were well protected on the inside dock. We’d definitely stay there again. We weathered a rainy gray day and then woke up to blue skies and a calm wind on Thursday – a perfect day to go home!

West coast of Florida

Mellow trip w/ Martin on watch

The trip up the coast was largely uneventful. Seas were wonderfully calm and somehow we managed another transit day with no rain or storms. My first engine room check I did notice that we were low on hydraulic oil. A bit of searching and we found the starboard stabilizer cylinder was leaking. Martin locked the fin and we continued on – the seas were calm and we didn’t really notice we were down a stabilizer.

St Pete in the distance – almost home!

By the time we arrived in the bay it was dead calm and amazingly beautiful. The water looked like velvet. The best thing was that we were in and tied to the transient dock at 11:55pm so we made it back to St Pete in May – if only by 5 minutes 😊 

What a morning view!

The next morning we had our inspection (to get our permanent slip assignment. We gave B a thorough wash down and moved to her new home. Et voila!

Blossom at the fuel dock (thank you Diane for the photo!)

Blossom in her new home

The trip was a bit of a frustrating with the rainy, windy weather but it was great to be back aboard and to get Blossom back to Florida. We can’t thank Jim enough – he’s the best and we so appreciate his help getting us home!

And now it’s summer time… Blossom will spend part of the summer in St Pete and part in River Forest while we’re traveling (River Forest is our hurricane plan for the season). It’s only a 36 hour trip so we can bring her back and forth as weather permits.

Boat Business: A few leaky issues:

• The sump pump for the condensate on the AC compressors is leaking a little bit. Another task for St Pete.
• The fresh water faucet on the foredeck has a slight leak.
• The starboard stabilizer cylinder has sprung a leak. We lost a bit of oil on the trip up. We spoke with an ABT tech and he'll be coming Tuesday.