Key West bound

We are underway southbound in the Gulf of Mexico. on an overnight direct to Key West. There is not a lot to update since my last post, but this is the last big block of time until we are done in Key West and back underway, more than a month hence.

Tonight's moonrise over Marco Island from about five miles out.

Saturday we ate at the yacht club bar, which I have learned is called The Cove, on a cold and blustery night. We had briefly talked about walking the quarter mile to the beach to see if we could get a look at the ten foot waves that were forecast, but it was too cold and windy even for that and we just hunkered down in the boat with the heaters on.

When I was ready to hit the hay sometime around 1am I checked the depth sounder, just to make sure it was not going to go into alarm overnight, and I was somewhat shocked to see it reading just 8'. We were still at a tide of +1.2', and it would go down to -0.8' in the wee hours, meaning not only would the alarm be screaming, but also we would be grazing the bottom. That has never happened to us here. I changed the settings to prevent an alarm and headed to bed.

We have never seen this "island" in Venice in the decade we've been coming here.

Louise, who was already well into her sleep cycle when I discovered that the wind had driven all the water out of the lagoon, thus woke to something of a surprise in the morning, with the lines tight and all the boarding gates below the level of the fixed docks.We were planning on a leisurely start anyway, but a check of the tide table and our eyeballs on the actual water level told us we could not even get out of Venice until afternoon.

I explained our situation to the dockmaster, and fortunately no one was scheduled to come into our slip until the following day. He had no problem with us staying until after noon. With that settled, we strolled back to the clubhouse when they opened for Sunday brunch at 10. It's an a-la-carte menu that would be more appropriately called "breakfast" (lunch items are served after 11:30), but we had brunchy cocktails anyway.

Brunch at VYC. As visitors they put a tiny version of our home club's burgee on our table.

We finally dropped lines at 12:40 with the tide at +0.9', the highest it would get until after dark, in case we needed the 1pm opening at the Hatchett Creek bridge. We had to take the deeper channel back toward the inlet to even get out of the club, and with the water so low, we cleared the bridge with room to spare without an opening.

I had to set my chart offset to -1' below Mean Lower Low Water to have nearly accurate soundings, meaning nearly two full feet of water disappeared from the gulf overnight. We try never to hit Venice at low tide, and yet here we were. We skated over the shallow parts with inches under the keel but made it all the way through the land cut without incident.

Another island we've never seen before.

We were both starting to breathe again when we promptly ran aground in a known trouble spot where, even with this water level, the chart and survey said we should have at least a foot under us. 55 tons moving at five knots is a lot of momentum, and that carried us right over it, but we heard and felt the keel hit three times before we were out of it.

With such a late start, we only had really two options for stopping for the night. One was a tight but familiar anchorage in Englewood with a shallow bar across the entrance. And the other was a series of three spots off-channel in Cape Haze, a little further along but on the other side of a gantlet of shallow spots surveyed at just over 6'.

Sanibel light, on the southern tip of the island just before the pass.

Just as well that it would be a short day, because I could not let Otto drive at all, steering either by hand or on heading mode the entire day. When we got to Englewood I had an uneasy feeling about trying to cross the bar, and we pressed on to Cape Haze. Before we even got there we heard another scrape on the keel, but the sounder was reading 7' and we surmised it was a wayward crab pot in the middle of the channel.

I was hoping to just graze the bottom in the shallow stretch, but no such luck We plowed through the sand for close to fifty yards, modulating the throttle and using maybe a third of our 370 horses to push through. We got all the barnacles off the keel but did not end up having dinner mid-channel while we waited for more tide at 7pm, though that had been a distinct possibility. Fortunately we had seen exactly zero other boats the whole day; we were the only crazies out there, which we joked about with one of the bridge tenders. He saluted our courage.

Vector steaming up Matanzas Pass into Ft. Myers Beach. Photo: Erin Miller

We arrived to Cape Haze right around 4pm. We've previously anchored in the "lollipop" toward the east end, but we were mindful that the last time we stayed there, we picked up so many weeds we had to have a diver clear our sea chest. At least, that's where we think we picked them up. With such low water, we'd be in even more weeds this time, and we would once again be running both the generator and the heaters, drawing a lot of water into the system. This time we checked out the smaller anchorage at the west end of the same island.

We dropped the hook, but immediately determined that this spot, too, was weedy and shallow, and so instead we moved to an even smaller indentation along the south of the island and dropped the hook in 13' (map).  That, we figured, would have our intakes in clear water all night. Normally when staying here we take the tender down the little canal, land at the bridge abutment, and walk to dinner. But this anchorage was a bit further from the canal, and it was too cold and windy to want to launch the tender, so we just stayed home and had the leftover meatballs our friend Dave had made for my birthday.

One of many similar restaurants in FMB. This one has beer.

Yesterday was again bitter cold in the morning, and Louise fired up the gen when she got up to get some heat going. I was soon awakened by the wakes of passing boats headed out fishing; the no-wake zone we were in is apparently widely ignored. Whereas there had been no traffic whatsoever on Sunday, the wind had abated and it was a sunny day, cold notwithstanding. The lunar tide was again negative, and we waited until 10 to weigh the anchor so we could have a bit more water.

It was still shallow, with wind-driven water levels at least a foot below normal, but we made it through the whole day without touching bottom. We needed to keep moving in order to be in position for today's narrow crossing window to get to Key West, and so we had our sights set on getting at least past the Sanibel Causeway bridge and near the inlet for our departure.

Looking down the canal from the dinghy dock we had a view of Vector on her mooring.

There's an anchorage just past the bridge, with a dinner option in dinghy distance, but we learned our friends Erin and Chris, aboard Barefeet, were headed to the mooring field in Fort Myers Beach, just across the inlet. I spent part of the day going back and forth with the harbormaster about a mooring and we were able to book a 60' mooring in the east field for the night.

I went topside and lowered our VHF antennas, but it turned out I need not have; with the low water level we slid under the C-span of the Sanibel Causeway Bridge with two feet to spare. After rounding Bowditch Point we threaded our way through Matanzas Pass and most of the mooring field, passing where we had stopped on our last visit as well as Barefeet before heading under the bridge, around the corner, and back to the east field, where we picked up ball 64 (map).

The new main dinghy dock under the bridge. Nice, but busy. Last time we had to just tie to the seawall.

We met up with Chris and Erin at Doc Ford's Rum Bar & Grill, which has its own courtesy dock. It was great catching up with them, and we will see them again in Key West in a few weeks. It was a long, cold dinghy ride home.

The leaking water heater has had us turning the hot water pressure on just long enough to take our showers or wash the dishes, and we had come into the anchorage with the water fully hot, between running the gen in the morning, and using my new timer switch to top off the heat from excess alternator power just before we arrived. I turned the water on to shave before dinner, and in the business of trying to get ready and head out, I forgot to turn it back off again.

Some of the old beachside joints are still just slabs, but several now have food trailers.

We had barely sat back down after getting home from dinner when Louise asked "why is the water pump running"? I sprinted to the engine room to find the tray supporting the water heater full to its rim with water, and it was spilling over onto everything below it and into the bilge. 20 minutes of cleanup ensued, and since I removed most of it with a shop vac I can estimate we lost about four gallons of hot water.  Of course, replacing four (out of 20) gallons of 120° water with four gallons of 55° water meant having to run the water heater again before we could shower.

The rate of leakage has increased to the point where we have to take quick showers and we can no longer leave the water on long enough to run the 45-minute dishwasher cycle. The dishwasher can heat its own water but it is plumbed only to the hot water supply, so today I had to jury-rig a hose to the sink faucet to run it with the cold water supply, and that will continue until I can replace the water heater. The replacement is due to arrive in Key West on Friday.

Passing Barefeet on our way out.

This morning Erin and Chris dropped by in their tender for a chat before lunch. And after lunch we took our own tender down a nearby canal and tied up at the town kayak/dinghy dock near the city ball field and swimming pool, closed since the storms, for a stroll along the beach drive.

We returned to Vector just in time for our 1pm checkout, the latest they would extend us from the normal 11am without charging us another day. As 1pm was too early to get underway for Key West, we dropped lines and headed just east of the mooring field and dropped a lunch hook (map). I took the tender down to the main city dinghy dock under the bridge for a stroll around town; they have replaced the dinghy dock since our last visit.

The pirate tour was just coming back in as we left the pass. Arrrr.

The town is thriving. Lots of infrastructure is yet to be replaced, and some restaurants are still operating from food trucks, but the tourists and snowbirds are definitely here. Quite a change from our last visit, shortly after Hurricane Ian.  It would have been nice to spend a couple of days, and maybe catch up with other friends nearby, but we have this one very short window to get all the way to the Keys, and our non-changeable marina reservation starts Thursday.

We weighed anchor around 2:30 and made our way back out Matanzas Pass and set a course for Key West. That was perhaps a tad too early, because we have a fair current and good conditions, and so our arrival time on the plotter keeps creeping towards the very start of my morning watch. Louise does not like to drive into the harbor, and we try to plan for me to again have the conn well ahead of that time. I'll adjust course and speed throughout my watch to try to delay our arrival.

Tonight's sunset over the gulf.

The course I'd already plotted was not a straight line to begin with. By adding just about a mile to the overall length, I can keep us inside the 12nm territorial limit for several more hours. Outside of that limit, our Starlink terminal stops working. If I need to add more time to the trip I can just extend that dogleg, although it will not keep us in Starlink coverage any longer because the territorial limit line turns quickly east there.

We should be anchored in Man of War Harbor tomorrow, and we hope the marina will let us come in first thing Thursday morning before the wind picks up as forecast. We are booked until March 5, at which time we will start working our way back north. You will next hear from me after we depart Key West.