The Little Things

Day 58 - 60 (Sun,  Jan 8 – Tues, Jan 10, 2012): We departed Cape Marina at 5am and headed out the short distance to the ocean. We managed to pass one Carnival Cruise ship on our way out. Wow was that big at 30 feet to our port side. We hit the ocean at dawn. What a beautiful day. We headed down the coast to Fort Pierce.   Dobbie and Patrick slept quite a while. Typical… and how they both arrive “fresh as daisies.” I was a little hesitant about the anchorage site (folks told us about a spot just off the entrance to Fort Pierce). Once again that nasty tummy intuition played out. The bottom was not conducive to holding well, the current was insane and on top of everything, our winlass malfunctioned just as we were bringing up the anchor to move on to another spot. I kept Gaia in place and Patrick managed to get the winlass working long enough to get the anchor up. We spent the night at Harbor Town Marina. It was a nice facility and had great access to several shops we would ultimately need to fix our winlass.  The next day Patrick was up early being friendly. He met Charlie and sure enough… Charlie was able to fabricate the small piece needed to fix our winlass. We also met another gentleman who had sailed the Bahamas for many years. He had the same winlass as ours so we headed to his boat to do one more look before attempting to fix ours. Good thing, because our stripper (a small bar that ensures the chain is pulling away from the winlass and storing away in the chain locker below deck) was not aligned properly. That had been a big part of our issue the previous evening. We headed back to Gaia with the new knowledge and started our repairs. All seemed to go very well. Odd how the little things are the ones that can really come up and bite you.

After the repairs were complete it was too late to head out to West Palm Beach (Lake Worth) so, we decided to spend one more night at Fort Pierce. Great evening and incredible moon.

Tuesday morning about 6am we headed out to WPB and Lake Worth. Another beautiful day. Not much usable wind but the ocean and day were splendid. Dolphins everywhere. We pulled into WPB around 3pm and tried our new anchor and the repairs we made to the winlass. Perfection… I love it when a plan comes together. The evening and night were also perfect. Quiet rocking… nothing seems to put me to sleep better these days. I got up at one point to check on things. The moon was almost full. There were a few clouds in the sky. It looked like daylight but with different colors and contrast of the clouds against the sky was absolutely beautiful. Dawn was also breathtaking. Dobbie, Patrick and I enjoyed breakfast on the Lido Deck.