Day One-Headed to Key West

Now, I have this motion sickness thing, it's pretty bad, like I can't even watch a movie with a lot of motion in it or I will throw up. So we get out into Hawk Channel and the wind is blowing 20kts (23 mph). I look at Tim and said, you and I are going to reef, it's not up for discussion.

So we get on course, reefed with 1/2 main and 1/2 jib and we were flying.  I was doing pretty good, but the further south we got the more the seas kicked up. Pretty soon we had about 4 foot seas and this is inside the reef.  We are on a beam reach, so we are getting the waves broadside.  The boat and Ray (the Raymarine autopilot) handled the conditions beautifully.  I had my drugs and seasickness bands on and despite a brief episode of queasiness, I did damn good also. Good thing, because Compy Comp decided that he was more comfortable down below.  Huh. Interesting.  However, he was working on finding us a marina down in Key West.

Throughout the day, seas were getting choppier, but the winds were steady, I let out (yeah, you read that right) I let out a little bit more of the jib.  We wanted to make sure to get through the Channel 5 bridge with plenty of daylight.

The first night stop is tucked in bayside by the Channel 5 bridge.  We've anchored here before, but due to the howling winds that were just supposed to pick up during the night as a frontal boundary passed through, we got further tucked up.  (I tried to get a chart shot in here, but all this crap about legal use, blah, blah, blah.)  I don't have the coordinates because the GPS'sssss are on the boat, but basically head northeast after passing thru Channel 5 and get tucked up past the #2 Red flashing light west of Matecumbe Harbor and before Matecumbe Bight.  Great for the strong SSE winds we were getting, there were 3-4 of us tucked up there that night.

Another lesson learned: Make sure your damn windlass works.  We have an electric windlass, and it got jammed; you can loosen it up with the winch handle to unjam it, so I drove the boat around in circles while Tim tended to that.  However, he didn't lock it back down so I loosen up the anchor and it's free wheeling, which would be good for anchoring right? Not when you are not ready so I'm holding on to it for all it's worth until we ready to actually drop it.

We NAILED the anchoring, got dug in at a good sandy spot.  So it's pretty much sunset at this time, we take our bearings, Tim sets the GPS for anchor drag (stupid GPS anchor drag alarms-i hate them).  We were really at a great anchorage, even though the wind was howling, the water was pretty still. But swinging back and forth on that anchor is kinda alarming. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep this night.

Ye Olde Conch Republic flag is a-blowing