Day 61: Sunday, November 4, 2012
Underway: 9:55 am Motor Off: 3:55 pm Miles Traveled: 33 Stayed At: Anchor
First Things First: First light house (at the Naval Air Station), first time anchoring on the ICW; first time putting two bow anchors out to avoid dragging toward the beach overnight.
Mile 163 to Mile 196: We passed into Florida soon after leaving Barber Marina – woohoo! We will be somewhere in Florida for at least 5 months. I hope we like it.
It was hard leaving Barber Marina. We already stayed longer than we expected – we were very comfortable and having too much fun with Ann on Rumpshaker (sorry you couldn’t be with us Rob). We could easily stay here for weeks. Barber has to be the nicest and cleanest marina we’ve stayed at yet. A little far out of town but they have a courtesy car which we used several times to explore and do errands. The place is immaculate and extremely well built and yet, because of its remoteness, is only at about 30% capacity in the marina part. Rob and Ann will be living here on their boat for the foreseeable future – they should have a great time.
Getting back into the travel routine is hard to do even after only a few down days having fun. We left fairly late – Ann made us a hearty breakfast to send us on our way – pancakes, bacon and coffee – and lots of hugs. We had a hard time saying goodbye – we have become really good friends. We wish them good luck on their new adventure relocating their lives to southern Alabama. They know the area fairly well so they should make the transition easily. We are looking forward to seeing them again in the future.
We ended up with a following breeze on a warm and sunny day so we were able to motorsail most of the day. There aren’t a lot of protected anchorages along this part of the ICW – I wish we could just pull up to someone’s dock but I don’ think that would be appreciated by many people. After a longer than expected day – we were slowed significantly by the outgoing tide – we anchored behind Big Sabine Point and tucked in behind some sand dunes. Pretty scenery, but very tricky to get into. The water is shallow everywhere around us except for a narrow channel leading back into this cove. We had to hope the GPS and chart were accurate or we would have been dragging along the bottom. The protection isn’t great but there aren’t many other choices. Let’s hope for a quiet night.
