Stuck Boat (Florida Boating, Post 21)

Thursday, February 11

Turns out I’m not crazy. Although I didn’t think of it in middle of the night, John and I have since calculated that the moment that I woke up in a claustrophobic panic was probably the moment that our boat had quietly grounded. Yep, we were stuck in the mud!

Our tide table was for a nearby channel, and to our surprise, the tides were completely different, even though we were only a few short miles away. I would have thought the tides would be roughly the same for the same general region, but nope, not at all. What we had thought was low tide, was actually high tide. Oops!

During the night the water drained away leaving us to settle into the mud. As the boat sunk into the mud, it would have scraped the hull through the mucky sand one last time and then stilled completely, no longer rocking on the water, triggering my ever-alert subconsciousness to sound the alarm. Stuck! Trapped! Get out, get out!

But in this case, we weren’t in any actual danger. Here’s what it looked like at dawn the next morning.

Here’s our keel stuck in the mud. 

The prop is barely above the mud.

We were sitting on bottom. Even our kayak was aground.

Luckily we hadn’t tipped sideways at all. Our boat is fairly flat-bottomed. Good thing our keel was up! There was nothing to do except feel foolish and wait for high tide. We had breakfast and watched the birds walk around on the mud. We even saw a raccoon venture out. He was too far away for a photo, but we got a good view of him through our binoculars. We had a relaxing morning waiting to float.

At first we were patient with it. It was very beautiful. 

Oh no, is that rain headed our way?

Yep.

At this point I was having a difficult time of it. I hadn’t slept well, and now we were stuck, and it was cold and rainy!

But the sun came back out. 

And the water slowly started coming back in.

Nothing to do now except sit around and take pictures.

We looked at our charts to decide where to go next. Because we couldn’t stay here!

My subconscious was rightfully concerned last night. Boats are supposed to be floating!

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