Hygge Adventures: 045: Winds, Waves and Family

We left Ft. Lauderdale on February 6^th with the goal of reaching North Palm Beach and anchoring out but during the last third of our forty-six-mile trip, the north winds began to blow hard and the waves came up giving us a modest “nose on” pounding. There not being a protected anchorage in the area for a northwind, we started to call around to marinas in the Palm Beach area. That was an “eye opener” as they say. Most of the places were in the $5 per foot range with a forty-foot minimum. Ouch. The last place we called was another Safe Harbor Marina (Old Port Cove, to be exact) and they were reasonable. No minimum and a decent rate especially given that the facilities were befitting of what one might expect in Palm Beach, as in: “top notch, top notch.”

Our Palm Beach neighbor:

On the way up north, we did have to wait for a couple of bridges to open, and while circling to wait something got caught in my bow thruster and the shear pin broke. (Note prior loss of our stern thruster shear pin on the river system.) Given the high winds, docking without a bow thruster wasn’t the easiest, but we had a dockhand to help us in and we tied up without “scratching anyone’s anchor.” (That is two Caddyshack references in as many paragraphs!) The bow thruster shear pin replacement is a bit easier than the stern thruster replacement as gravity works for you given the positioning of the thruster.

The winds did not abate on the 7^th, so we elected to stay another night in the marina and do some shopping for groceries, bourbon, and a few cigars. Recall that the bilge pump was “on the fritz” in Post 042 and I thought I had it fixed with a good cleaning of the bilge. I was mistaken. The electromagnetic controller would not shut off the pump even when no more water was there to be pumped overboard. I had to pull the fuse to shut off the pump to get some sleep on the night of the 6^th. I fussed around with it a good part of the morning of the 7^th and finally bit the bullet and replaced the float switch. (Because they are so bad, I brought three spare ones on this trip.) That finally fixed it.

Between the bow thruster and bilge bump, that took up my entire morning, but Hygge was fully operational until the next thing broke.

On the 8^th, the winds having abated, we headed up to Stuart, Fl. The gas attendant in Palm Beach asked if we were “going outside” (as in via the Atlantic Ocean) and we said, “No, the ICW,” to which he responded, “Ok, good, its eight-foot waves out there.” Soon after we passed the Ft. Pierce inlet (path to/from the Atlantic) the Coast Guard sent out a message asking any available boat to assist a boat that had sunk in the inlet. We were too far past to help, but another boat responded back quickly that they had rescued two boaters in the water and that their center-console boat had capsized, “No injuries but broken hearts.” Inlets are notoriously tricky when the ocean is up as all that energy funnels into a small space leading to even bigger seas.

We did pass more sunken boats; the count must be well over one hundred so far. This is a big problem in Florida, and each one makes me feel a bit sad for the boats.

The trip up was uneventful with the very last bit having to negotiate two bridges that needed to open for us just a hundred yards apart. The trick being that both had to open before we could go through either one, since you don’t want to get stuck in that “no man’s” land between the two. Successfully getting by that last hurdle, we got a mooring ball at Sunset Marina’s mooring field. Sunset is a great marina with a nice coffee shop and a top-notch restaurant next door.