The Plan for 2022

First and foremost “yes” we still have our boat in the South. Selling Moonlight and buying the Bayliner “Swell” did not impact our southern getaway on our little tug boat Pursuit. We have a boat in the North and a boat in the South. We also get to pay storage, insurance and slip fees on two boats but what the heck you only live once …..right 😣

Our intent for the next season was to travel to the Gulf Coast of Florida by traveling back down the ICW to Stuart, going into the St. Lucie River and passing through Lake O (Okeechobee). By traveling this route, you end up in Fort Myers. This is where all Minnesotans and Wisconsinites winter! Kidding, but it seems that way. We wanted to explore this area and ports north connecting with friends, family and fellow cruisers. However, Big Monkey Wrench! The lock at Port St. Lucie will be under construction January to March—exactly when we wanted to pass through. Ok, we cannot cut across Florida on the boat.

We spent a lot of time trying for a Plan B to enable a trip to the west side of Florida. First idea would be to leave here earlier than January 5 …. Joe’s on board with this, but just how early would we have to leave to drive to the boat, uncover her, prepare her for cruising, provision her and then get to Port St. Lucie (just over 100 miles). We probably would have had to have left already.

No, we don’t want to be that rushed. We also don’t want to miss out on seeing friends and family during this busy season. A bit of a schedule works ok for us but rushing to beat a construction deadline sounds taxing. We have learned things do not go as planned because Mother Nature usually controls and boats are unpredictable creatures.

Of course the other obvious route would be to go South through the Keys. Simple right? Well, to start, this would mean passing through several long waterways in very populated areas, actually spending time in the Keys and heading out into Florida Bay. What’s wrong with that you ask? Are you ready for the loooong answer?

We dissected this route inch by inch on the chart. Having spent some time in West Palm Beach on Bob, the idea of cruising through Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Miami wasn’t real appealing. If you look at Google Maps, this end of the Atlantic side of Florida looks like one big long City. That means a lot of boats! I saw a YouTube recently of a line of hundreds of boats waiting at a boat launch and these were not 14’ Lund Fishing boats. Yikes. If you think about it, every home on the various waterways (canals, lakes, rivers, etc) has multiple boats on their docks and the multitude of marinas containing more boats with racks of boats and the boats sitting on trailers in driveways are all ready to float onto the narrow ICW.

We experienced a rookie move back a few years ago on Bob where we attempted to move the boat South, just a bit, from our slip in Fort Lauderdale on a weekend day. Literally horrifying boat traffic. Seriously Scary. Yes, Bob was small but Pursuit is also a small boat. 32’ is a small cruising boat comparatively speaking.

February 2017 from a Bob the Bayliner blog entry….

What can you say about Super Bowl Sunday? What a great day to go boating! Well, that’s what everyone in Riviera Beach thought. And so did we. We headed for the Lake Worth Inlet for a day on the water. At first, we had a few boats to contend with as we made our way south in the channel. The ICW channel. Unfortunately, the further south we got, the more boats joined us. And, as you quickly discover, even though everyone uses the channel to get from north to south, not everyone necessarily wants to go the same speed. Some of us might want to go at trawler speed (7-8 mph). Some like it a tad faster. Like the 35-40 foot center console boats (try to realize just how big the really is) with 3 or 4 Yamaha 350 outboards. That’s 1400 HP! These guys hit the testosterone button the minute they hit the water. 65-70 mph is just the opening bid for these boats. It’s like trying to have a parade on a freeway. I could post some pics of the confusion that we ran into near Peanut Island but everything was blurry and out of focus. We decided that the party scene that we ran into was not for us and we headed back north and ran up the ICW about 3 miles and found that we liked the No Wake pace up there better. After that, we headed back to the marina bar and a nice night of football and beer. What a game.

Well, that was a trip down memory lane. In order to find the above blurb, I had to read back a few years in the old “Bob” posts. Hard to believe we’ve been doing this 5 years already. Also, that our (new to us) Bayliner is just a bigger version of Bob! Fate!

Ok, back to the Plan. Joe has a different feel about traveling down 70 miles of cityscapes all the way to Homestead but I didn’t like the idea. We haven’t had any issues getting into marinas to date, but Covid, the Canadian border opening back up, tons of people moving to Florida and more boats may just be a tipping point. We have also heard rumors of $7 per foot for dockage in Miami. We normally pay anywhere from $1 to $3.

So the next hurdle would be the Keys. Now don’t get me wrong, the idea of our boat in the Keys is very nice but we talk to people and read a lot of blogs. The picture in your mind of beautiful, peaceful anchorages would be pretty hard to find these days. The Keys are jam packed with boats.

The jumping off point to go West into Florida Bay and the Everglades would be Marathon Key, halfway to Key West. So, if you cannot get your boat into a marina that means you need to find a place to anchor. Well we have no problem with that and our boat is pretty self-sufficient. However, when looking into anchorages near Marathon, they are few and far between. Lots and lots of private land. This means you need to try to find a place to anchor your boat and be able to dinghy to shore. You cannot leave your dinghy on private property or it will be ticketed, stolen and/or removed. Should we include the discussion of all the people we have met and read about that are taking off to “live their dream on a boat” who have absolutely no experience with boating and especially anchoring in shallow, rough, crowded waters. Not appealing!

We could end up being at Marathon for a very long time, depending on the weather. We would want to have perfectly flat water to cross Florida bay. This is called a “weather window”.

Ok, truth be told, the above photo is not an anchorage and is a holiday weekend, but I think you get the gist!

Then there is Florida Bay, a big, shallow body of open water. Why is it called a Bay? It’s the Gulf of Mexico!!! We do not like big, shallow, open water! Again, if you read enough information, you get some bad stories. We heard an interesting one last Spring from a couple in New Smyrna about a crossing they called white knuckled; it ended with a discussion of the possible sale of the boat! This was after they didn’t discuss what happened during the crossing for over a week. They couldn’t talk about it!

Yes, we know, many, many people do this all the time and have no problems. However, we don’t want to push …..

So, look at the chart…… after you would leave Marathon Key, the next habitable place is Everglades City. It is a long way and we cannot make it in one day. Slow boat! The other issue is we need to get Coconut (our doggie) to shore. She, brat that she is, will not go on a puppy pad. We tried to train her, but obviously we didn’t try hard enough. Along the shoreline you will see a lot of islands and appealing looking anchorages but thoroughly reviewing the area shows very shallow depth and lots of sandbars. We did contact a woman who writes a blog and has traveled through this area many times on her catamaran with her dog. She mentioned a spot where we could anchor and land the dinghy, of course, all weather dependent.

Well, ok, but once you get through all of this and close to Marco Island, what do you find but lots more shallow water! We did not even look into a marina at Marco. Thinking about all of the above, the planning, etc., we felt weary and we are still at home!

Joe will do whatever to make sure I’m happy and don’t throw up my arms and say “we’re not doing this anymore”…. It seems like there are a lot of places and points that could cause issues and stress. So how long would all of this take? It could be weeks, possibly a month!

Now, we know that a lot of you more experienced cruisers probably are calling us big babies and much worse, but hey, we’re here to get out of the cold, explore and float around a bit. We readily admit we are fake cruisers.

So, after thoroughly researching each step of getting over to the Gulf of Mexico, we both came to the conclusion that this isn’t really how we want to spend our time this season. Maybe if we were younger……

Even though we’ve been to several ports south of where Pursuit is located now (Cape Canaveral), there are many, many more exciting places to be explored. We are going to spend the month of January near Cocoa Beach on Merritt Island. We now have family and friends joining us near there. Next, we will hopefully move a bit further South along the Atlantic Ocean on the ICW, when we want…. doesn’t that sound more relaxing!