tuesday January 1, 2007 (key largo, fl)

Happy New Year! After falling out if the dinghy, going back to slapdash for dry clothes we went to a local bar last night with a good group of friends and partied until I lost my shoe. Everyone had a great time, and somehow we all managed to make it back to our respective boats safely. I woke up with a headache, in need of a new set of flip flops, and a new found respect for disembarking from the dinghy. Jaime said she turned around after hearing the splash and all she could see was my legs sticking straight out of the water and my left hand thrusting a plastic cup above the surface. I was completely immersed head first, but managed to fall out of the dink, and get back in all without spilling my drink. Try that sometime.

We had record heat today, by far the hottest day we’ve had yet so we spent it inside with the A/C cranked watching season 3 of 24. Nothing like Special Agent Jack Bauer and a greasy breakfast to kick off the new year.

It was really hard to believe given the sweltering heat, but we are apparently in for some nasty weather. Tonight a cold front is forecast to bring 20 knot winds from the North. We don’t trust the holding in this anchorage and since it’s really exposed to North winds we spent a couple hours preparing the boat for the nasty weather. First thing was to check the anchor, the water was still calm and clear so all I had to do was take the dink over there and look at it from the surface. It was buried and out of sight, so should hold really well. Next we let out a little more anchor line; we were only in 5 feet of water and had about 70 feet out which should be more than enough. We then set the anchor alarm which lets us know if we are dragging, organized the boat, made sure the flashlights were working, the dink was secured, and our key in the ignition. We were as ready as we could be with nothing to do now but wait for the wind…

9 PM – Winds start. Unfortunately the forecast was correct, we were experiencing 20 knots from the north. The bay we are in is quite shallow, so wave height shouldn’t be a problem. We have no protection from the north here though so will be taking the full force of whatever this front has in store for us.

9-12PM – Not much has changed, steady 20-25 knots now. The northerly wind has us pinned back against the anchor and is trying its best to blast us against the shoreline. We’re about 100 yards from shore, so if it does drag we’ll have to act quickly.

wednesday January 2, 2007 (key largo, fl)

12-1AM – Steady 25 knots with gusts to 30 now. We’ve double checked all of the precautions we took so there’s not much else we can do. There won’t be much sleep for us tonight. Not because of the rocking and pounding from the waves, but because everything we own is gambled on the side of an anchor and line which are currently straining to hold us back from land against a relentless wind.

2AM – The forecasted 20 knots is now a full gale force 35 knot winds. Neither of us is sleeping, and we are sure glad we spent time getting the boat ready for this weather. It would be pretty rough trying to do anything outside now with this wind and the dark moonless night.

3AM – BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! I was already half way to the door when the anchor alarm went off. The boat had started to roll which meant that we were broadside to the wind so I knew something was wrong. The alarm only confirmed what I had expected once outside. Our anchor had dragged. There was now nothing stopping us from being rammed against the shore by the gale. We had about 80 yards of sea room to correct our sad state of affair.

Jaime was right behind me. Our situation was precarious so we were moving deliberately, but were both quite calm. We had talked about this precise scenario and knew exactly what needed to be done. There was no need to panic. I would lower the drive leg, and start the engine. Jaime went forward with a headlamp and prepared to take in the anchor. By this time it was clear that the anchor would not reset itself, so the first priority was to engage the engine to push us against the wind and away from shore. As we did that, we would bring up anchor and line into the boat. Once we were a comfortable distance from shore we could discuss our options and try resetting the anchor… in theory.

3:05AM – Jaime is on deck. Engine is running and drive leg is down. I’m at the helm and ready to respond to Jaime’s direction. We have a set of pre arranged hand signals so that she can direct me to move the boat up the anchor line, the wind drowns out any attempt at communicating verbally. At this point we were still broadside to wind and moving steadily towards shore. The anchor line ran off into the wind off the port side. Jaime was signaling me to bring the boat around into the wind and straight north. Not the easiest thing in the dark against 35 knots of wind and 50 yards (and closing) from shore, but apart from the high stakes not the most difficult either. Throttle forward and hard to port. No response, the boat moved straight forward but wouldn’t bear an inch to port. Assuming this was the effect of the wind on our beam, I throttled forward more. Jaime was still signaling port (now a little more frantically) and by the time we had hit full throttle it was evident that we had a serious problem. No steerage.

3:10AM – 20 yards from shore. We need to turn the boat to port in order to retrieve the anchor and control. We are now close enough to the coastline for our deck light to illuminate houses, docks and waves crashing against rock walled jetties, a sight that would shake the steeliest nerves. Ours are far from steel so at this point we had completely abandoned our calm demeanor in favor of being scared shitless.

3:12AM - We had given the current course of action all the time we could. If we kept it up we would certainly lose the boat, so it was time to change up the strategy. We had put fenders out the night before and now it looked like we may be able to use them. We could see a dock on the shore line. Even though I had no steerage, I was still able to control forward and reverse so if I could line it up correctly, there was a possibility that we could hit the dock with our starboard side. With some fenders between us to minimize the damage it could buy us just enough time to resolve the steerage issue. Being pinned against a dock being slammed by waves and wind may not sound like a great option, but lets face it, it beats the crap out of being bashed to pieces against a rock wall.

3:15AM – 10 yards from shore, and 2 yards from the dock. Option two wasn’t going to work. We had lined it up pretty good, but with me at the helm Jaime was alone on deck trying to manage fenders and dock lines while wind and waves pitched around our 10 thousand pound boat like a cork, an impossible situation. After sliding past the dock, contact with the rocks looked inevitable. At this point things were looking their worst.

3:20AM – The engine were in full reverse, alarms were screaming and water was being pushed over the back deck and into the cockpit. Somehow we actually began to make headway against the wind, in reverse. Not much but just enough for the starboard hull to clear the jetty by a couple of feet as we rocketed along parallel to the shoreline. Then the port hull did the same, this one cleared by inches.

3:25AM – Clear of the jetty now, but by no means out of danger. We were still only a few yards from shore, without steerage, and towing a rouge anchor through a crowded anchorage in the middle of the night with the wind blowing up our skirt. I was able to keep us back from shore using full reverse but holding this position against the weather caused the seas to crash into the stern. This boat isn’t designed for that and it made things pretty uncomfortable (wet) in the cockpit. We were now being blown into the crowded part of the anchorage, it seemed like a toss-up at this point whether we would hit the shore first or another boat so I was fully prepared to beach it if we had to.

3:26AM – Jaime came back to the cockpit for the boat knife. Getting rid of the anchor would not only increase our chances of getting the boat out of here safely, it would also prevent us from dragging it over top of someone else’s anchor and putting them in the same position. Recovering it now was out of the question with everything working against us, so it had to be cut. A few seconds later Jaime had us free of the anchor, and with that liability out of the way our full concentration could now be centered on getting us away from shore while avoiding the other boats.

3:30AM – Free from any risk of being tangled in our own anchor line and with enough room from the reversing I was now able to try our starboard steerage. It worked. So in order to point us into the wind and away from shore, I backed around with the helm all the way over to starboard. We had barely enough sea room to do it and half expected to bury our drive leg but by waiting until the right moment were able to find space between anchored boats for the maneuver.

3:35AM – It worked! Now facing the right direction it was time to get out of Dodge. With the throttle full forward we were relieved to finally put some distance between us and the shore. It was difficult navigating through the anchorage though. Since I couldn’t turn to port, there was no way to turn back into the wind. Once the wind started to push us around to starboard the only way to steer out of it was to let it push us around and then keep steering to starboard until we made a big clockwise circle and could point away again. Somehow using that crude method, and with Jaime pointing out the unlit boats to me from the deck we were able to get out of imminent danger and finally start thinking in increments of minutes instead of seconds.

3:40AM – We’ve never been so happy to be far from shore in the middle of the night in a full gale with impaired steerage. We eventually found that we could steer to port by manually pulling the drive leg over. This was a two person job until Jaime discovered that by using a boat hook in one hand and the helm in the other that one person could keep the boat from going around in circles. This enabled us to get even further from shore. At least from here if things got worse we would have more time to deal with them before having to worry about being wrecked on a rocky shoreline.

With helming back to being a one person job I was free to go foreword and rig up a new anchor and line and can now say with some experience that being on the deck of a boat with no pants on rummaging through an anchor locker while you watch the bow pitch up high into the air and the down again slamming through waves that at worst threaten to wash you clear off the boat and at best leave you sputtering and shivering in the cold wind is not a jolly bunch of fun. Once that bit of nastiness was done we could go to work on addressing the steerage problem with the security of knowing that if we really messed up the job that we had an anchor ready to go which with luck would keep us from repeating that last little escapade twice in one night.

Before long we had the steering working again. Turns out the steering line had worked loose somehow on the port side. Once diagnosed it was a simple matter to reattach it to regain full control of the boat. By 4:30 we were motoring around enjoying the gale and trying to avoid unlit crab traps, buoys, and nav markers while listening to other boats distress calls and coastguard chatter on the VHF. Sadly another boat in our anchorage was taking on water at the same time as our exploit. The water caused problems with their generator and batteries. Without power her bilge pumps couldn’t do their job. We don’t know for sure yet, but believe the boat was lost.

We carried on this way until the sun came up and then we were able to make our way to an anchorage that looked like it had some protection from the north wind. We made it there and set the new anchor, but the wind was just as bad. We were joined there by a few other boats that had spent the night motoring around after dragging their anchors as well. Apparently we weren’t the only ones feeling sleep deprived. We stayed long enough to eat some quick snacks, have a cup of hot chocolate, go to the bathroom and consult the charts. The wind hadn’t let up at all by this point and neither of us were feeling very comfortable with things so we decided on a marina about 10 miles away where we could hopefully find some shelter and lick our wounds.

We made it to a Marina in Tavernier. We were disappointed to find that the marina and our slip was completely exposed to the north wind. After all this we would now be attempting to bring the slapdash into a slip made up of 4 big posts and a concrete wall with a 25 knot tailwind. Joy. It was our trickiest docking experience yet, but with the help of 4 people on the dock we managed to get the lines on and eventually secure the boat between the 4 big posts without any damage.

It’s late afternoon and we now have almost every dock line we own straining to keep us in place. The wind is still howling and we haven’t found peace of mind yet. We are stuck here now until the winds clock around to the east, Saturday according to the latest prediction. It will be another sleepless night watching the lines and making changes based on wind speed and direction. Snapping a line here could be worse than dragging anchor. It would either pin us up against the concrete wall and bash the hull around, or worse, send us flailing around the marina. Oh, we’re also keeping a close eye on a bunch of boats anchored just outside the marina. In the current wind direction if they drag they will be right on top of us within minutes. Not sure what we’re supposed to do about that, but I might as well be awake and not miss the show.

Remember how New Years day was the hottest we had seen yet? Well today is the coldest. They actually had snow in Naples FL, and with this crazy wind the temperature here actually dropped to the high 20’s. We used the air conditioning for the first time this week, and now we are huddled up inside using the heater for the first time. The dink is almost completely flat. With the drastic change in air temperature its looking like a 2 week old birthday balloon.

All tied up and nowhere to go has provided us with the first opportunity to really think things through and actually talk about our scare from the night before. We were both pretty terrified at times, but happy with our performance and the outcome. We don’t really think there’s too much that we could have done differently except that I will probably keep some pants close by next time. Our preparations were good and the decisions we made at the time were sound based on the information we had. We’ve determined that the steering problem is what really did us in. We’ve dropped the drive leg and motored at least a hundred times since we’ve had the boat without a problem, so the odds of that happening at 3AM in a gale with your anchor dragging have to be pretty astronomical. On the other hand, some people would say that that’s the only time it will happen. In any case without that glitch we would have just motored up the line, recovered our anchor and reset it. No big deal. One thing is sure; we’ll be keeping an eye on that annoying little slapdash personality trait from now on and if it happens again we should be able to diagnose it a lot more quickly. That second anchor will always be ready to go too.

It rattled us pretty good and it was really sobering to be in a scenario where immediate decisions have dramatic consequences. Before we set off we knew that days like this would eventually be encountered, and had accepted that as being part of the risks involved. It’s truly a different thing to experience it, but it hasn’t changed anything. If this was easy everyone would be doing it. First chance we get we’ll be on our way across the Gulf Stream.

thursday January 3, 2007 (tavernier, fl)

After a long night of line checking and adjusting at about 6AM this morning I went to bed for the first time in 48 hours. Shortly afterwards Jaime got up to take the day shift. I slept until noon. We didn’t leave the boat, just puttered around here, made a few calls home, updated the website and took care of some emails.

As mentioned, we are literally stuck here until the wind changes. We won’t be able to safely exit the marina until it does. After that the plan will be to go back to our original anchorage and see if we can recover our anchor and chain. We know exactly where it is, and don’t think many people will be out in this weather so we should have a pretty good chance of finding it. Then we hurry up and wait. We can’t attempt to cross the Gulf stream until there’s no north in the wind. Apparently it can be a pretty nasty bit of water when the winds are from the north (the seas were 17 feet in the gulf stream last night) and it’s not forecast to change at all until at least Monday. We are going to sit tight and make the most of our time here picking up any last minute supplies and get ready to go as soon as the wind changes.

saturday January 5, 2007 (tavernier, fl)

What a difference a couple of days can make. The wind has clocked around to the east now so we are officially on the lee shore now. Things are much calmer around here. First thing tomorrow morning we can leave. We’ll try to find the anchor and rode that we jettisoned and a nice place to wait for the right weather for our Bahamas crossing. This is only the second time since we left Myrtle Beach 3 and a half months ago that we’ve been in a marina so we’ve made the most of it. It’s a novelty now. We step off of the boat onto land, not onto another boat. Long hot showers and copious loads of clean laundry abound. Both diesel and water tanks are full to capacity, and yes, each with the right stuff thank you very much. Jaime scrubbed the whole deck from stem to stern and rinsed it from a hose attached to a never ending supply of fresh water. We’ve got full propane tanks and a freezer full of steaks. We even went to a movie last night; I am Legend. We haven’t been gone long but are totally out of touch. We showed up at the theater and had absolutely no idea what any one of the movies being shown was about. We hadn’t even heard of them. And yes for the record, there is a tavern near Tavernier. Life is good.

One comment on marinas; they charge by the foot. Maybe that’s fair. After all larger boats require larger slips. Larger slips take up more room so in all fairness should fetch a higher rate. Right? Theoretically that’s true but the fact is most slips are exactly the same size. Sure there’s a few for the real big ones, but for the most part its one size fits most. For instance our slip is exactly the same size as the one next to us and it has a Lagoon 37 parked in it. Without getting into precise measurements, it’s longer and wider boat than ours. So he’s paying more than us to stay here even though his slip is exactly the same size.

Imagine if this kind of logic were applied to hotel rooms; “I can see that you’re a few inches taller since your last stay, here’s your new room rate.” Make sure to take off your socks and shoes before check-in.  

Okay maybe an unfair comparison. And just to be sporting lets forget that it really doesn’t make any difference to a marina whether your boat is 15 feet or 40, just like it doesn’t matter to a hotel if you are 4 feet tall or 6. They are going to stick you both in the same room (or slip) anyway. Looking past all that, the fact remains that they seem to charge way too much for each foot. At 34 feet we are relatively small but still incur about the same overnight cost as a lot of hotels. This seems a bit odd since we arrived with our own shelter, bed, linens and towels. There’s no pool, you don’t get maid service, room service or even any of those miniature soaps or shampoos. Continental breakfast? I don’t think so; you get a plug-in and a tap. And too bad for you if you didn’t bring your own hose to connect to that tap you’ll just have to use a bucket.

Sure, if you are staying for a month or a year it can be pretty cheap relative to renting a house or carrying a mortgage. But we overnighters are referred to as “transients” and transients seem to get fleeced for about 2 and 3 bucks a foot in Florida. May not sound like much, but in practical terms; our bill for three nights will exceed the cost of 10 sirloin steaks, 5 flats of beer, 5 bottles of wine, admission for 2 to ‘I am Legend’ (plus a medium popcorn) and 15 gallons of diesel. All that for 4 posts, a plug-in, and a faucet.

Apparently marinas, or as Jaime refers to them “boat hotels” will remain an occasional luxury for the slapdash. But I have to admit, those long hot showers were nice.

sunday January 6, 2007 (key largo, fl)

We’re back where it all went down. .

We made an early departure from the boat hotel in Tavernier this morning in order to get back here with time enough in the day to try and locate our rouge anchor and line. The first part of our plan went off without a hitch, we arrived before lunch. The second part may be a little harder than anticipated. Jaime and I have slightly different opinions on its potential location, and even though we are only talking about the matter of 50 yards between our estimates it makes a huge difference. To make matters worse the wind is still a brisk 15 knots which really hampers the visibility.

We trolled back and forth and back and forth and back and forth… but came up empty handed. The only way to see the bottom was through a view bucket. A view bucket is essentially a 5 gallon pail with a clear bottom. To use it you submerge the bottom of the bucket and peer through the top. This affords you a little window to look through; little being the operative word. The culmination of our search and rescue efforts were focused down to the bottom of a pail which would be a lot like trying to look for an unknown point in the sky without ever taking your eye away from a telescope. I was running the dink along our grid pattern and Jaime had her head stuck in the bucket. This turned out to be a good arrangement because she eventually got seasick. Since her face was already in a bucket she was all set to throw up without having to abandon her post.

Our odds will improve significantly if the wind dies down. When it’s calm looking through the water in this bay is like looking through a window. On the plus side the same wind that’s frustrating our survey work has ‘probably’ prevented anyone else from picking it up. There is always the nagging possibility that our anchor may not even be there anymore. Our ‘treasure’ hunt would be a lot more tolerable if we knew that the treasure was in fact there. If someone had spotted the anchor or line they would have certainly scooped it up. The anchor is worth a few hundred bucks by itself and the chain we had goes for about 3 bucks a foot. A small price to pay for the safety of boat and crew of course so if that’s our pound of flesh so be it. We will still try though if for no other reason because we don’t really have anything else to do at this point. We’re locked into a waiting game and are now placing bets on which will come first; our registration or a favorable weather window.  I assure you, the matter of the sluggish registration would be almost unbearably frustrating if conditions were right for a crossing, but as it stands we would be sitting here right now waiting for weather even if the boat was documented.

That’s the optimist’s position though. The pessimist would be screaming out that if we had our registration before Christmas when we were supposed to that we would have already been sitting comfortably in Bimini eating conch fritters when the big gale came through and none if this would have even happened. Oh well, c’est la vive. For now we’ll pass the time honing our rescue diver skills by laying down more search patterns in Buttonwood Sound. PADI would be proud.

After a quick trip back to the slapdash we returned sporting the appropriate attire which included wetsuits, fins, masks. We each had a line attached to a float which we could use to mark anything we found. On the way we had retraced the path slapdash had taken that crazy night and anchored the dink in what we thought was a pretty central location. From there we both splashed into the water and started our search. It wasn’t long, maybe 15 minutes, before Jaime swam over to tell me that she had found the anchor. It was only 20 feet from where we anchored the dink! We returned to the spot she had marked with a float. Even though it was pretty much buried there was most definitely a line there that looked just like the one we had abandoned a week ago. I dove down to retrieve it but it was really stuck. It took a few tries before I finally unearthed the line and anchor. Funny thing though; after all that excitement it wasn’t even ours! What are the odds? Who knows how long ago this thing had been cut and abandoned but it was pretty old. There was about 8 feet of line attached to a rusted old anchor. I still have no idea how Jaime found it.

A false start, but if we could find some 20 year old relic how hard could it be to find one that had only been there a week? I would probably be easy if you looked in the right spot but herein lays the problem.  A couple of hours later it had become pretty clear that we were not looking in the right spot. We were cold and hungry so called off the search for the day. All we had to show for our efforts was a strange shell that some weird crustacean had discarded. They are about the size of a large dinner plate and kind of look like a stingray but with a hard red shell. We’ve done a lot of diving but haven’t run into these critters before.

When we got back to the boat I decided that it would be a good idea to finally clean the bottom of our hulls. What was I thinking? Probably that the undertaking was long overdue and since I was wet and cold already that now was as good a time as any. There were all kinds of barnacles and so much seaweed that the hulls were starting to resemble an octopuses garden in the sea. I got busy with the scrubber and scraper and pretty soon the water around me was clouded with debris. Fortunately the stuff came off pretty easily; even so I can’t say that bottom cleaning is a particularly pleasant job. I guess you have to do it every month or so too, so that’s something to look forward to. When I emerged Jaime threw some kudos my way. Normally that would have been nice but at the time it did nothing to console me. What she couldn’t see was that there were these squiggly little worm things all over me. They looked like boogers but were squirming around like worms. As soon as I noticed them I was squirming around like a worm too trying to shake them off. We have no idea what they were but I’m pretty sure that they were trying to kill me for destroying the vegetation nation that they had painstakingly constructed on our hulls.  So after 4 hours in the water and covered with living sea boogers I scrambled out and took a fresh water rinse on the deck.

My wrinkled up fingers and toes finally started to get back to normal after the second beer.

tuesday january 8, 2008 (key largo, fl)

Inspired by a stupid episode of 24 from the night before we decided to employ the latest in satellite technology to help us locate our anchor. We reviewed the tracks on our GPS from a week ago and managed to acquire the anchor coordinates. Then we hopped in the dink with our hand held GPS to go and mark the spot. The location turned out to be about 75 yards north of the area we had covered yesterday. We felt like we had a pretty good point to start from now so once the wind settles down we’ll resume the search. Incidentally, I priced out a replacement anchor and found out that they cost 700 bucks. We had better find this thing.

There’s also a front coming through which will create the right conditions for a crossing this week. If our registration gets here in time we’ll be Bahamas bound this Friday or Saturday with or without the anchor.

wednesday january 9, 2008 (key largo, fl)

Success!

We were on our way into town today and noticed that the water was pretty flat in the area we had marked with the GPS. The visibility was better than it had been all week, we could now see right down to the bottom without leaving the boat. We decided to make a few passes over the target area in the dink. On the second pass we found a door mat that had blown off our boat in the storm so knew that we were close. On the next pass Jaime saw something. I asked if she wanted me to check it out but she said that it was probably just a fish or something. For some reason we decided to spin around and check it out anyway and with the help of the trusty view bucket realized at that moment that we had just found our anchor bridle. This was an impromptu search so we weren’t prepared with a boat hook, masks, fins or anything but we couldn’t chance going back to the boat either. It would be too easy to lose the spot and never find it again. There wasn’t much point in debating who would be the lucky one to dive in so I stripped down to my shorts and got it over with. Once down there I could see that much like the last anchor we found the whole thing was buried. The piece that Jaime saw sticking out was only about 12 inches long and was the only part not completely covered over by the mud and silt. We were pretty excited though and drug up the chain, bridle and anchor without giving much thought to all the mess. Once it was loaded up we joyfully returned our anchor to its rightful home.