Cape Canaveral to West Palm Beach, FL, February 6-7, 2022

      This was yet another of those legs that didn't quite fit into a day sail, so we prepared for what we thought would be our last overnight sail for a while (spoiler alert, it wasn't).  We didn't want to be a news story, so we carefully read up on the Kennedy launch schedule and thought we would be fine.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the Air Force is also able to launch rockets and they use a different web site.  They had a launch scheduled for the time I wanted to depart, but some sources said that it was delayed.  As you may have noticed, this new age of information often has conflicting and inaccurate information.  Eventually, I just picked up the phone and called the Coast Guard, who assured me that the rocket was most certainly not launching today.  Reassured, we went through our checklists and eased Dragonfly from the dock and out into the channel.  A large cruise ship was heading out at the same time and I decided it would be prudent to just idle in the channel and let it go in front of us.  I'm pretty sure we featured in a lot of cruise photos as the revelers on the outdoor decks were crowding the rails, waving and pointing their phones at us.

     It was apparently the official hour for cruise ships to depart, because we eventually saw four of them as we wandered out from the Cape and turned south as the sun set.  Normally, the best way to track other ships is with the fancy electronics.  There is a system called AIS (Automatic Identification System) that all big commercial ships and most cruisers use that broadcasts your location, speed, direction of travel and information about your boat to everyone within radio range.  It can be fun to see where the container ship next to you is headed.  With cruise shipsvone hardly needs this system, especially at night when the thousands of individual lights turn the boat into a miniature moon that is clearly visible for miles and miles.  I watched them all head out to sea aimed at the Bahamas and listened to them negotiate how they would pass each other as the slower ships got lapped by the faster ones.

     Lisa and I have our night passage routines down pretty well now and she went  to bed especially early tonight.  This had the unexpected bonus of her popping up close to midnight, ready to take a turn at the helm.  I actually was feeling quite awake and wasn't planning to get her up for three more hours, but once she appeared, I was easily persuaded to go down and catch some sleep myself.  I find sleeping on passages very comfortable; the motion somehow soothes me and makes sleep easy to reach.  This is only true on the relatively calm passages -- sometimes the boat is really tossing about and you feel like you are airborne as often as you are on the bed.  That doesn't really promote sleep, plus it usually is joined by lots of loud banging noises as the water smashes into the hulls and underside of the bridge joining the two hulls.  Its a bit tricky to predict too.  The forecasts provide average swell heights, intervals between waves and direction that they are coming from, but even when it is right it doesn't always accurately capture the experience.  Some swells are higher, but build and recede slowly and result in a quite gentle motion.  Others might be lower, but they rise and fall more quickly and toss you around with more force.  You end up building a new vocabulary to try to describe it.  I hear sailors call the seas confused, sharp, rolly, choppy and lots more.  There is also language to describe the exact direction that the waves are hitting you from.  Things that one person likes might be terrible for another and for sure catamarans experience certain sea states very differently than monohulls.  In any event, our weather guy had some concerns that the seas would be too big for comfort tonight, but they weren't bad at all.  Part of it was that they were more gentle swells and part of it was that he was looking at conditions described by the weather buoy that was a lot further offshore than we were.  Closer to shore, conditions weren't bad.  I think Lisa liked them less well than I did, but by the time I woke up to take back over around 5am things were really settling down by any measure.

 South Florida by sea

     As we neared West Palm, you could really see the density of development along the coast really build up.  Having learned our lesson to carefully research harbor entrances previously, we were able to navigate into the Lake Worth channel around noon without any drama at all.  Lisa had a nap and the noontime arrival gave her plenty of time to have coffee and awaken fully before she had to help me navigate.  I attribute this to the fact that we planned to anchor in West Palm, so she didn't have to prepare lines and fenders.  Had we been tying up to a dock, I'm sure we'd have arrived early and she would have had to rush.  

     The charts only indicated a few good anchorages, but the real world was different.  People were anchored everywhere.  Some spots looked like they didn't really have much water, but there were several boats that I know draw 6 feet there, so I guess the charts might not have been totally accurate.  We were hoping to anchor at a spot between the two drawbridges.  Our first choice was to anchor closer to downtown Palm Beach between the two municipal piers and backup was to go on the other side of the channel closer to the island.  When we arrived, the area that I had picked as my top choice was crammed with boats and I decided at a glance that it wasn't for me.  I'm still not super confident at estimating distances and predicting how we would swing, so I headed for the less busy side.  It would be a longer dinghy ride to shore, but only by a matter of a couple of minutes.

      Setting anchor turned out to be more challenging here that we expected.  The principal problem was the wind was blowing pretty hard in one direction and the current was running even harder in the opposite direction.  This resulted in some smaller boats pointing in one direction and the bigger catamarans (which catch a lot more wind) pointing in a different direction.  We tried one spot, but initially misjudged the anchor because while we were facing the wind, the boat actually was drifting the other way, so we ended up moving forward from the anchor until we were nearly on top of some small boat.  Luckily the boat was empty so we didn't stress them out, but it was obvious we needed to back away.  We tried again in a spot we thought was safely distant and started making lunch while I kept an eye out.  Unfortunately, as we settled, we were holding fine, but I still felt like we were too close to that same boat.  I think it might actually have been ok in the end, but I'm not proud and I decided to try a different spot.  As I headed for that one, a neighboring boat gave me a consult.  He pointed out a location closer to the other bridge where there were only two boats and said that he knew it was good holding there too.  He was partially being friendly and partially trying to urge me to stay the hell away from him, but I think it was a better spot.  We managed to set anchor there on the first drop and aside from eventually nudging up to a buoy on the fifth day, it turned out to be a very good spot.  Once we anchored there, it attracted other boats and eventually our spot became the crowded one and the place we originally picked emptied out.  Its weird how that works.  At the end of the day, it was probably better than the location we first picked because the downtown side had a lot of music and people buzzed by you in their dinghies headed to shore all the time.  Our side was quieter and only your immediate neighbors went past you.  

If you zoom in, you can see we are pretty close to the buoy. 
I eventually did nudge it and had to take in some anchor chain