Monday December 7 to Wednesday December 9, 2015
Herons and sailboats like some wind! Not too much, but enough to soar and swoop and dash along with the porpoises alongside.
We left Pensacola at 7:30am, and pulled up the sails as soon as we could. It was another beautiful day, with light winds from the NE. Perfect! We followed the coastline towards Panama City. Ducking in there or Destin was always an option. By the late afternoon the winds had shifted to the SW. The sunset and the stars came out. It was magical.
We were on 4 hour shifts. My watch was with Bruce. The J team (Jim and John) slept, or tried to sleep, when Bruce and I were on. And vice versa.
At about 6am on Tuesday morning, Bruce noticed that his I-phone had made the switch automatically to Eastern time. We looked at the road atlas, and sure enough, we were just south of the time zone border on the map. But the odd thing was that the Garmin and the three other phones continued on Central time for another 24 hours! We made the switch to Eastern time in our ship’s log. That is what it was supposed to be.
We changed course when we were off Panama City, heading for the southern tip of the missile test zone. We did not want to run into any unmarked surprises! We turned off the motor and just sailed all day Tuesday. Very peaceful! I made shrimp and grits for dinner, and the porpoises gave us an escort to our delight.
Tuesday night was not what we expected. We thought the winds would swing around and come the east. We also thought they were supposed to be light. Nope! As Tuesday night wore on the winds kept building from the NE. We were healed over, cushions were sliding off the seats, and it felt like we were riding a bucking bronco. You become intimately involved with just how spongy your pillow is as your face plants in the pillow one moment and is airborne the next. Winds were 15 to 20 knots with some higher gusts. The good news is that the waves didn’t build higher than 3 or 4 feet. Bruce and John reefed the main, and no one got much sleep.
We had purposely been going slow through the night. The plan was to arrive at R2, a bouy off Tarpon Springs, at 10am. We had heard that there could be crab pots littering the water as far as 30 miles offshore.
Bruce and I came on watch at 4am on Wednesday morning. It was pitch dark and the winds were finally light. We turned off the engine and slowly sailed on our course. The minute we could see the surface of the water (and there were no crab pots there), we turned on the engine, put the pedal to the metal, and drove it like we stole it! The eastern sky was cloudy, so we did not have to worry about going straight into the rising sun.
We arrived at Tarpon Springs and tied up to the dock behind Spongerama at 12:30pm. The trip had been 356 nautical miles over 52 hours. Phew! It was great to be right in the heart of the sponge docks, where everyone speaks Greek. John’s sisters had parked in the Spongerama parking lot, and we’re going to walk around the town until they found us. But they found us across the parking lot! We all had lunch at the Greek restaurant that is part of the Spongerama complex. Fun and delicious.
What a trip! We could not/would not have done it without help! We will be eternally grateful to John and Bruce for their help!