Sailing! Well…mostly motoring (Florida Boating, Post 19)

Wednesday, February 10

Finally, it’s the morning of our departure! It’s a fine sunny morning with a stiff onshore breeze. We get all our stuff loaded.

The Bimini top is up and the mainsail is uncovered and ready to go.

Sink, sleeping berth, toilet, gas stove. In the middle is the keel, more about that later.

We had quite a time getting out of our slip. We messed up the cast-off, and the onshore wind blew the boat broadside, shoving the outboard motor almost up against the cement dock. We had the outboard motor on, but we didn’t have enough momentum yet to counter the wind. We’re towing our kayak, and it got blown to the dock edge next to the boat, and the kayak line almost fouled the prop (motor propellor).

An onlooker grabbed the bow line while John was in the boat trying to gain control with the outboard, which left me to leap into the water to fend the boat off the dock and try to keep the kayak out of the way. The water was only a couple of feet deep but it was gross muck and the prop was spewing mud. It was all very messy and not a graceful start to our trip!

The amusing thing was, I had just finished telling our friendly onlooker that no matter what happens, I was not jumping in! Ten minutes later, I jumped in, lol.

At first we motored along, because it was too shallow to put down our keel. Sailboats need a heavy keel that goes deep into the water to balance the pressure of the wind on the sail above. We can pull our keel up with cables and a winch, which allows us to go in shallow water. But we can’t sail with the keel up.

Also the wind wasn’t a favorable direction and the channel was initially too narrow to tack. Tacking is how sailboats go against the wind. First you go a bit too much to one direction for awhile, then you turn and go a bit too much in the other direction for awhile, in a zigzag pattern, allowing you to go upwind. But in order to zigzag, you need a wide path, which we didn’t have. So we motored until we could get into deeper water.

Here we are, motoring along towing the kayak.

The water was amazing colors.

That’s an electric trolling motor you see behind John. We have two outboard motors hanging off the back end of the boat. The gas outboard is for making actual progress. The electric trolling motor is for going very slow while fishing.

More pictures of green water. A lot of this trip so far has been difficult for me, but I cannot stare long enough at that water.

The channel is now deep and wide enough to sail, and there’s plenty of wind.

The keel is up due to the shallows, so in order to sail we’ll need to lower it.

 

Now partway lowered:

Keel most of the way down:

John goes on deck to prepare the jib. The jib is a smaller sail at the front of the boat, that’s not attached to the mast except at the top. Meanwhile, I’m handling the lines (control ropes) and the tiller. We steer with a wooden tiller that hangs off the back of the boat, rather than a wheel.

Here we have the jib up and the mainsail almost ready. There’s just a few ties keeping it from flopping everywhere. The mainsail is already on the boom, which is the bar parallel to the boat that’s attached to the mast.

We’ve arrived at our first destination! We open the front hatch for ventilation and install our solar panel so I can charge my computer. The solar panel keeps the battery charged, from which we run the lights and a USB outlet for charging our electronics. We are not using our electric trolling motor because our solar panel is inadequate for that. We would need the boat docked with plug-in electric power at night in order to charge the battery enough to use the electric motor.

First thing we did after anchoring was go on a short paddle around in the kayak. There’s our current home!

After a couple of hours we noticed that the tide didn’t seem to be matching our tide tables. The tide was going out when we were expecting it to go in. Huh. That could be a problem in these shallow waters.

The sunset was beautiful!

After dark I settled in and talked with some friends on zoom – yes, I had enough cell tower to create an internet hotspot – just barely, but enough!

Meanwhile John got onto the internet to figure out why our tide table seemed to be wrong. Why is the tide going out now, and how low is it going to go?

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com