Hobe Sound at anchor

Cloudy, overcast, rainy, ugh!

It was overcast with showers as we cast off from Stuart. Unfortunately, we were somewhat out of practice. We remembered to undo all the lines before backing out, a real plus to getting off the dock! We even tied the dinghy off the bow so it wouldn’t get caught between the boat and the pilings as we backed. However, we forgot about the fenders. Pilings and fenders don’t play well together. An inflatable fender does real well with a horizontal, floating dock but is of no use with a vertical piling. When backing out, it can get caught between the piling and the boat if the boat is rubbing against the piling – giving the fender no where to go – it gets caught. Well, that happened to us this morning! As the boat backed, I could see everything in slow motion but was powerless to stop it. The fender, which was tied to the lifelines got caught between the boat and the piling and the boat came to a halt halfway out of the slip. Lucky for us, the large round 18” fender was tied to the mid-ship cleat which stopped the boat saving the stanchions from damage!

After that bit of excitement, it started to rain and the day went downhill from there. Shortly the rain was associated with wind and then thunder and lightening with accompanied waves with reduced visibility, all bad things for someone on the water. With gusts up to 30 kts, we started looking for an anchorage. First we had go negotiate a bridge opening. When we called, he said he would open the bridge when he saw us (we were less than 500 ft away – we couldn’t see him either). Eventually he did see us and we hurried through and found an anchorage on the other side.

With that, we’re here for the night and will try for Palm Beach tomorrow where we hope to hook up with Joe Mastri. I say try because we have 12 bridge openings to negotiate on Friday!! Some are on demand, some on the hour and half hour, some at 15 minutes after and 15 before the hour. We’ll probably spend a lot of time waiting for openings but that’s how it is for this part of the ICW.

Meanwhile, Matthew is doing his homework. We’re getting his assignments off the school website which is working out pretty well so far. He’s putting in about 3 to 4 hours a day.

Friday is supposed to be sunny with a high of 68, we’ll see about that, I’m getting skeptical given the weatherman’s recent performance (today was supposed to be sunny with a high of 77, ha!)