From Stuart, it is only one day’s travel to get to Ft. Lauderdale, the end of this leg of Adventuress’ maiden voyage.  We awoke early to get the most use of the hours of daylight.  As was our habit, we checked the weather report over coffee and breakfast.

 

NOAA had issued a warning for “hazardous conditions” until mid-morning for all inlets, including St Lucie inlet and the next inlet down, Jupiter Bay.  We did some further research about these “hazardous conditions” and concluded that what NOAA meant was when wind and tide oppose each other.  When the tide runs in one direction and the wind in another, the opposing forces create higher, more unstable waves.  If you’re not careful, and sometimes even if you are careful, such conditions can make things rough, or even dangerous.

 

Mid-morning would be when the outgoing tided ended and the tide was slack.  A slack tide is when the perpetual motion of the ocean tides takes a momentary breather and the water moves neither in nor out.  The winds, on the other hand, had been fairly constant, blowing easterly to southeasterly.  That is, the wind was blowing on-shore.  The other factor we had going into the mix was the narrowness of the inlet.  The narrower the inlet, the more water pressure you accumulated, resulting in a stronger tide.  The St. Lucie Inlet was as narrow as they came, with rocks standing on either side maybe only a hundred feet apart.

 

Oi.

 

But first, we had to get there.  Our Lyft driver the night before was another old sailor.  He warned us quite soberly to be very careful around Hell’s Gate and advised us that Jupiter Bay Inlet was even worse.  With a name like Hell’s Gate, I didn’t want to see worse!  Taking a look at the charts, we could see why.

The St. Lucie River takes an abrupt ninety-degree starboard turn and then a second ninety-degree port turn to create a dog-leg bend before it gets to its inlet to the Atlantic Ocean.  Between those two bends, the already shallow channel shoals up to about one foot in some places.  The “deep” spots were carefully marked with channel markers, so you had to be vigilant that you didn’t cut a corner someplace or you’d be polishing your props and calling for a boat tow.  If you looked on Google maps, you could even see the shoals on their satellite images.

 

 

The plan was going to be that we’d make Hell’s Gate, and then before attempting the St. Lucie Inlet, we could stand off a bit and judge the conditions for ourselves.   If they looked too rough, we could always dodge into the intracoastal.  It wouldn’t be ideal to take the intracoastal because there were something like a billion bridges to have to cross.  And we’d have to go farther south than Jupiter Bay to egress into the Atlantic.

 

 

Tide?  Check.  Wind?  Check.  Multiple difficult obstructions?  Check.  Contingency plan?  Check.  Anything else?  Oh, yeah.  Boat traffic.  The 16^th was a Sunday, and the sun shone (you know, Florida and all), so it seemed that everyone and their mother was out on the waters in their boats.  There were zippy small fast boats, big fast boats, and monster fast boats.  There was even a fast boat named Safari.  But, do you notice a trend?  Floridian boaters all seemed to boat fast.  By the time we made it to Hell’s Gate, the water was just crazy choppy from all the wakes.

 

But, we got to watch a lot of people taking Hell’s Gate.   Which meant we could see where others had safely gone, and we could look at the boats’ size and take a rough guess at how much draft they were pulling.  On that day, we didn’t see anyone going aground, even though everyone else was cutting the corner.  For ourselves, I can say that at one point, we shallowed up to 4.5 feet.  In the channel.  There was puckering.

 

Finally, we got through Hell’s Gate.  Standing a little way away from the inlet we could tell that the wind and tide were not yet causing the ruckus that NOAA had feared.  That didn’t mean that the wind might kick up later, of course, but for then and there, we were going!  And what a push we got!!  Adventuress picked up three knots of push for a short time, making a blazing 10.5 knots!  Who-hoo!

 

Being on genuine blue water was liberating after days of intracoastal cruising.  The wind blew with a salty whip.  The water was a rich cobalt blue and the sunshine was everywhere, reflecting and refracting off the water in a crazy free dance of light.  This day, the water was fair.  Long gentle rollers reminded us we were cruising an ocean rocked us predictably back and forth.  And dolphin.  Just one, this day, but it was better than cows or worse, mosquitos.

 

That was not to say that we were solitary travelers on an empty ocean.  The land remained visible on our starboard side as we travelled south.    For mile after mile, we saw beach resort after hotel after resort, all rimmed with the beautiful Floridian white sand beach and dotted with palm trees.  I imagined I could almost smell the coconut tanning oil and piña coladas from the bow.  And, of course, the other boaters.  The radar lit up like a summer field full of fireflies.

 

 

The day travelling south to Fort Lauderdale was perfect.  The sun was warm, the winds—10-15 knots, in other conditions what one might consider almost too much—blew away any biting bugs, kept us cool and did not conspire to make difficult seas.  By afternoon, what little chop we had in the morning had given way to just one lazy rolling swell after another.  It was as if the seas knew this would be our last day of this leg and wanted to apologize for all the earlier hardships.

 

We got to Fort Lauderdale with an abundant amount of light left.  Enough to get a waterside glimpse of what some truly ridiculous amounts of money gets you.  Holy 1% Batman, there was a TON of money on display as we came inland at Ft. Lauderdale.  Super-sized mega-yachts moored up on private docks next to multi-million-dollar waterfront homes.   Fort Lauderdale had it all.  In Louisiana, Adventuress was considered a big, expensive boat.  Here, I’m sure that what we paid for Adventuress wouldn’t have been enough for gas money.

 

And, at last, we found our slip.  Adventuress will rest in Florida until her cargo ship arrives (sometime mid-October now).  The cargo ship will bring Adventuress to Vancouver BC.  We are hoping that sometime around Thanksgiving, we’ll go up to meet her and bring her home.

 

Before we could leave, however, we had to make her ready for the second leg of the voyage.  Everything inside and out had to be cleaned, and stowed away.  Anything that might rot, or mold, or attract vermin, had to be thrown out.  The poop tank had to be pumped, and all the furniture had to be secured.  The bimini had to be taken down, too.  Oh, and because we didn’t have enough to do, we needed to leave her secured for hurricane conditions in case anything rolled this way in the next month.  And that meant not one, but two trips to West Marine.  Did I mention the heat?  It was unseasonably hot and humid in Fort Lauderdale, and the heat index was 105F.  We worked from dawn until the Lyft driver came to get us to take us to the airport to get her ready.  I’m sure that we sweated all the moisture in our bodies, and Robert burned to a lobster crisp.

 

But we’re done now.  Glad to be home.  Looking forward to the next adventure.

 

For this leg of Adventuress’ voyage home, we had gone 1220 nautical miles in sixteen days.  1126 waypoints spanning over four states.  Seen billions of stars in the sky, thousands of lightning strikes, two gators, and pods of dolphins.  In spite of, or maybe because of all the hardships, all the challenges, and all the discomforts it was still an adventure of a lifetime, and an incredible way to begin the boating life of a boat named aptly, Adventuress.