Sailing Offshore from Palm Beach to Key Biscayne

We spent a wonderful day people/boat watching in Palm Beach and cleaned the boat inside and out.  This was the first time we’ve been able to pull out the cockpit cushions and enjoy our outdoor living room!

The next day, taking a lesson from our St. Lucie Inlet experience, we left the Fort Worth Inlet at slack tide around 11am.  The inlet was MUCH calmer than before when we left  St. Lucie with an outgoing tide and an incoming wind tide pushing the seas up right at the inlet.  This time leaving the inlet was little more than worrying about the wake from the heavy boat traffic zipping by us as we powered out of the inlet at a whizzing 4kn/hr!

The seas had calmed down from 3-5 to around 2′ but the wind had moved farther south to a resounding SSE.  We raised sails and tried to sail.

For those of you who haven’t sailed much it goes like this:

We raise sails and we can sail about 60 degrees TOWARDS the wind direction.  But land is just off our right as we leave the inlet, so we have to sail to the left (port tack) of the wind.  We know that AT BEST we can turn across the wind (called a tack) and head approximately 120-130 degrees from our current heading.  Usually you get a little slip if there’s a current or strong winds, so you might not even make that if you can’t get the nose around and sails filled quick enough.  So we are basically sailing away from land, but away from our destination!  You can eyeball the compass and guesstimate where you’ll be heading when you tack, so you keep heading AWAY until you can tack back towards land and make some ‘distance made good’ (actually go farther than where you started).

BUT- there’s this thing called the Gulf Stream.  It runs offshore and is one of the great ocean currents that circulate water all over the world.  By Palm Beach the Gulf Stream comes as close as 1 nm to shore and runs north at an incredible 3kn.

Consider that an average sailboat can sail around 6kn/hr- we plan for 4kn.  If you are fighting a 3kn current you are, at best, making 3kn towards your destination.  At worst you are travelling at 1kn (or worse directly into the Stream.

As we sail farther and farther away from land, the Gulf Stream plays a bigger and bigger role in our heading and speed.  By the time we went out far enough that we could tack and make some forward headway towards land- the Gulf Stream was ‘drifting’ us off our course.  As a result, the boat was making the correct heading, but our actual track was very different.

After one tack, by the time we were back close to shore we actually LOST GROUND!

We could stay closer to shore where the Gulf Stream isn’t as strong, but that would mean LOT’S and LOT’S of short tacks.  I can’t imagine doing that all night long.

So we dropped the headsail (a genoa in this case) and motorsailed.  A parallel course to land, about .7 nm offshore put us about 30-45 degrees of the wind.  That meant we couldn’t really use the sails, but we were getting a hint of wind.  I pulled the mainsail boom over and ‘cheated it’ over tying it closer to the direction of the wind with a preventer to help the boat stability and maybe pick up a hint of speed from whatever wind we could.  Mainly the mainsail was helping keep the boat from bobbing around like one of those playground rides where the kid rides on a horsy rocking back and forth on this huge spring.

I finally got the autopilot working pretty good.  With the motor running and autopilot in control, really all there was to do was check for traffic, obstructions, and occasionally adjust our course a couple of degrees.

Emma was doing MUCH MUCH better this trip.  There was one moment we were touch-and-go but she came through that without incident (which means throwing up).  Mommy (yup- you guessed it, our names are no longer Hil, Hilary, JC, Jer, Jerry, HEY YOU &^$#%^!- They are Mommy and Daddy.  Legally recorded even was still wrangling the little one.  We had spurts (longer than moments, but shorter than stretches) when Emma slept in her car seat, but her prime directive was baby care.

We were a lot smarter this time out.  We had a sterile cockpit (my pilot friends will appreciate that term), free of possible flying objects, and we packed a picnic bag for everything we thought we might need to avoid the unpleasant nauseous experience of having to go below while the boat was rolling like a masochistic carnival ride.  Close by inside was pillows, blankets, jackets- all ready for a quick dash inside.  We did the same organizing inside.  The salon was desolate.  Everything, even the back seat cushions were stored away to avoid objects landing on the floor (sole) to become a trip hazard.

My main directive was the boat.  As night fell, I checked the fuel pressure gauge (new installation), switched fuel tanks, checked the bilge, turned on our nav lights, and our steaming light before settling in to the helm until midnight when Hil was going to relieve me for a couple of hours to get a little rest.

Every hour I would log our LAT and LONG, just in case the GPS went out and we had to navigate the old fashioned- visual reference (i.e- eyeball it).  I would also check the oil pressure gauge, the water temp gauge, the RPM, the autopilot belt tension, and adjust course if necessary.  Every fifteen minutes or so I would scan for traffic.  Otherwise I spent almost 4 hours doing soduko puzzles by moonlight.

Hil took over at midnight.  She didn’t really get that much sleep either wrangling a 25lb baby while Emma was awake and clingy and the time Emma was asleep in her car seat sleeping to the bucking and rolling of the boat can be fitful.  She handled the boat great until about 2:30am when Emma woke up.  I took back over so she could deal with Emma.

By 3am the wind picked up and the coast by Miami veers off to the west allowing us to adjust course and raise the headsail to sail close hauled.  With the autopilot I can raise the headsail alone and manage the sail trim. From 3am to 6am we sailed within 1nm to shore of Miami close hauled at 5-6kn.

The only worrysome point of the whole trip was crossing the Miami Port channel.  These huge cruise ships were coming in one after another.  The channel is fairly narrow across, but never the less- it is daunting our humble little ship bobbing across the sea in the wake of brightly lit small floating cities.

We made the Key Biscayne channel by dawn, motored to a nice little bay by Key Biscayne Yacht Club and spent the rest of the day recuperating.

The water was gloriously blue and for the first time since we left St. Simons- it felt like summer.