At 4:00am we were up and ready to go. We did all the possible preparation last night and things went very smoothly. By 4:30am we weighed anchor and were quietly slipping away in the dark. The unlit channel was a challenge using moonlight helped. to light the way, but did not provide the easily identifiable silhouettes of channel markers like it did when we arrived. The angle was different. We had another advantage now that we did not have n our arrival. We had our previous GPS tracks on the chart plotter from our arrival and also our trip to/from Loggerhead Key to guide us.
When we reached the north side of garden Key, the wind was quite strong; stronger than predicted for overnight and stronger than predicted for the coming day. We raised the mainsail with the planned reef set; transiting towards the exit channel. We were motor sailing.
By the time we turned to go down the channel, the winds were over 20 knots. We were now on our course to head south of the Keys and would maintain this course for the next several hours. The wind was not as predicted. I continued to motorsail for two more hours at a slow rate, as the wind was too close to our nose to raise either the jib or staysail. When the wind is close to your nose, it means it is coming straight at the boat. A sailboat can sail into the wind, but not directly into the wind. Instead it has to sail at an angle, like 30 degrees to the wind, which makes the distance traveled.
Finally around 6:30am, the wind backed and I was able to raise the jib. We shot from 3.7 knots (motorsailing) up to 6.3 knots (with no engine) in an instant. We stayed over 5 knots and sometimes 6 until noon when the wind veered to our nose again. Luckily we had reached the Marquesas. We investigated for about an hour to find a suitable anchorage spot with no luck and decided to move on to Boca Grande.
We investigated a few spots along the Boca Grande channel and decided to anchor at a wide spot in the channel. There is no place to anchor except in the channel here. The water goes quickly from 24 feet to less than 2 feet. I tried to stay to the right.
This channel has been cut by the fast moving tidal currents. The channel runs south to north on the western side of Boca Grande Key. It’s only about 60 feet wide. There are sea grass flats on either side of the channel on the north end of the island. At low tide, these grass flats are above the water. At high tide, they are submerged. This is supposed to provide excellent protection from large waves, and no protection from the wind. The current is so strong the boat will follow the current, not the wind. This means every 6 hours when the tidal current changes, so will the direction in which Distant Horizon faces… a lot of movement. Even so, this is the best place for us and protection from the waves is the primary attribute we considered.
We could have made it back to Key West, but that anchorage has virtually no protection from the wind or waves as they are being predicted. So, staying here for two days is our best option.
It was a long and busy day, and on the open water there wasn't much to take a picture of. However, as though to compensate for all that, we were treated with a very unusual sunset.
It was like the sky was on fire! As you can see, there was just one other boat anchored here. So, it was very peaceful.
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