Canceled Trip

Sadly, we have canceled our trip to Florida at the last minute. We had towed our boat to Florida in February and left it on a storage lot there, hoping to be able to regularly fly out once we were vaccinated.

The plan was to take the boat out on the water for several days this coming week. The experience is a somewhat primitive – sort of like camping on the water. It’s a tiny boat, only about 20 feet long. Boats of that size are generally considered day sailors.

There is a small cabin down below where we can sleep on narrow bunks, and we’ve installed a composting toilet. But that’s about it; it’s not even big enough to stand up straight down there when the hatch is closed. And it’s barely big enough to squeeze past the keel that comes up in the middle of the floor. Once you’ve managed to maneuver yourself onto the toilet you can’t sit up straight – you have to do whatever you’re doing leaned forward, with one hand bracing yourself so you don’t fall forward onto the retractable keel that’s inches from your face while the boat rocks wildly in the waves. Try explaining that to an emergency room technician – “Uh, I did a face-plant onto a keel when I was trying to take a crap in a thunderstorm…”

Like camping, most of your time is spent outside, so the weather really matters. And even when you’re down below sleeping, you’re still very subject to the weather.

Unfortunately, the weather forecast is for wind and thunderstorms. And not just for a few hours in the afternoons of a day or two. We looked at the hour-by-hour forecast for the whole week, and the wind is steady through the whole night, every night, and the scattered thunderstorms are 24/7 for the entire week.

Here’s the hourly report for just one day – the other days are similar.

Those wind speeds are actually good if you’ve got a decent sized boat and you’re trying to get somewhere. But our boat is small. We’d certainly survive the trip, assuming we weren’t hit by lightning (sailboats have big metal masts sticking way above everything else, like a big middle finger to the sky). Chances are we wouldn’t actually be hit by lightning, but I’d be worried about it the whole time.

And those everlasting winds! Winds of that speed aren’t going to lay us flat, but they’re going to cause chop. The waves wouldn’t swamp the boat, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. The water would be choppy all night long. The boat would be rocking and rolling and the rigging would be whistling and banging and clanging non-stop, every night. It makes it hard to sleep.

We’d be out there in the non-stop wind and chop, tossing on a tiny boat, listening to the thunder and the wind in the rigging, thinking, what are we doing here? Are we crazy? Why did we spend all that time and money and effort to subject ourselves to this? We saw the weather report. We knew better than this.

The whole point of the trip is the beautiful water, the warm sun, the birds, the peaceful solitude, paddling around exploring the mangroves in the kayak, and fishing quietly in the evening.

None of that happens during thunderstorms!

It was still very hard to bite the bullet and cancel the trip. It was our last chance for the season. The thunderstorms start in the spring and build intensity through the summer, peaking in July or August. Not to mention summer hurricanes. Now we don’t expect to make it out to Florida until the weather has calmed down this fall or winter.

Meanwhile, now what? No Florida blog posts. I’m sorry. I’ll have to think of something else to write about. The next two weeks loom empty…what will it be?

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