Thursday, December 3, 2009

After 27 days at Port St. Joe Marina, we were on the move again! We waved goodbye at 1:30 pm and continued our search for warmer weather. Our decision to take the ICW to Carrabelle rather than traveling “on the outside” through the Gulf from Port St. Joe had just as much to do with the forecast as the fact that our Gulf crossing would be shortened by about 30 miles if we started it from Carrabelle. We fought the current during the first five miles of the trip as we traveled through the channel between Port St. Joe back to the ICW. After turning east, the current eased somewhat and we started making better progress.




The afternoon weather turned sunny and warm making for a very pleasant journey. The anchorage we had in mind for the evening was just west of Apalachicola at Saul Creek where we were planning to meet Ron and Cindy of Ladybug, and Bob and Suzie of Dahlin who had left Port St. Joe a few minutes before us. It’s always fun to ask people how they named their boats. Dahlin was so named because Bob, who is from Alabama, always calls his sweetie Dahlin’. Ladybug is for luck since many think that if a ladybug lands on you, it is a good omen. Ron and Cindy’s previous boat was named Double Lucky.

Late in the afternoon, Gale turned on the water faucet and couldn’t get any pressure. He made sure the manual pump had not been engaged and then checked the tank. It looked like it was empty! Checking the bilge, he found it full of water – the hose clamp had vibrated loose and came off emptying the port side tank. Fortunately, we had extra clamps on board and Gale was able to make the repair. Since we were getting close to our anchorage, we saved the part of the job where we had to pump out the bilge for tomorrow.




We arrived at Saul Creek at 5:30 pm and found our friends rafted together and tucked back into a side creek. We prefer to anchor solo rather than rafting up, so we looked for an anchoring spot nearby. Our depth gauge showed 50 feet but the charts indicated it should be 8-10 feet at that point. We hailed Ladybug to find out what kind of depth they had and were told that it was 13 feet. We thought our gauge might be malfunctioning so we dropped the anchor. It was not malfunctioning – we had, evidently, found a big hole. We let out all the chain and some of the line. We also put the stern anchor out to keep us from swinging too much. Obviously, we could have brought the anchor back up and looked for a shallower spot, but we were happy with the holding and stayed where we were.

After getting set, we were invited to join everyone for dinner aboard Dahlin. Bob was making beef roast and Cindy was preparing her peach cobbler to serve with Blue Belle ice cream. Russ said it would be awhile before we ate, but we were welcome to come over and enjoy happy hour(s). We put our own dinner preparations back in the refrigerator, made an hors d’oeuvre to share, and motored over to the big boats for dinner.

We enjoyed a fun evening with great conversation, wonderful food and new friends and surprised ourselves upon discovering that it was after 11:30 pm when we finished dinner! There aren’t many nights we can say we’ve stayed up until midnight!