Our Voyage South

January 26, 2015

In early December we travelled down to Indiantown and Time 2 Go. We wanted to be home for Christmas and still be able to take off cruising early in the new year, so the trip was a work week. Time 2 Go was moved to the work yard on December 9th and we spent the next week cleaning, polishing, painting, fixing and stocking up, before flying home on Dec. 16th.

After a great Christmas with family, on January 8th we left Port Elgin in typical Bruce County weather (white-outs, closed roads and knee deep snow), we headed to Niagara to visit family before flying out on January 10th to West Palm Beach, Florida.

On Monday January 12th, Time 2 Go was moved from the work yard to the water, where we started our final preparations. By Friday we were feeling comfortable with the boat and ready to go. The following morning we left Indiantown and headed for the mooring field at Sunset Bay Marina in Stuart. The Intercoastal Waterway can get extremely busy, with very big and very fast boats on the weekend. So our plan was to spend the weekend in Stuart, buying more provisions and visiting the Farmer’s Market in old downtown Stuart, before proceeding on.

On Monday we left Stuart and started south, our planned destination was Peck Lake. Peck Lake is an anchorage off the Intercoastal Waterway that has easy access to a really long ocean beach. The temperature in the low 60’s and high winds out of the north, made our decision that Monday was not going to be a beach day, so we continued on to the Lake Worth anchorage. Our plan was to go offshore to Fort Lauderdale, rather than the ICW, but the continued high wind speeds from the north are forcing us to travel the ICW south again. The stretch of the ICW from Lake Worth to southern Miami is noted for the large number of bascule bridges that only open at a set time. We remember these bridges well from our first trip south. It felt like we were constantly racing from bridge to bridge to make the next opening. We were not looking forward to this again. On our first day travelling from Lake Worth to Boca Raton, we did 12 bridges, all opening at a set time. The surprising thing was, it was slightly easier this year, as we had recorded the times before on our last trip through. We ended our day anchored in Lake Boca Raton, a square lake surrounded with high rises, definitely not like a North Channel anchorage .

Eight bridges the next day got us to Lake Sylvia, an anchorage in Fort Lauderdale just off the ICW. We spent the weekend here hiding from all the weekend boaters on the ICW, catching up on shopping and doing odd jobs on the boat. While we were out, we found a store called Sailorman. It is a combination of used boat parts, new stuff and just plain boat junk. Dave had fun.

Monday morning we still couldn’t go off shore so it was back down the ICW again. After 4 more bridges we were nearing Florida University Cove, an anchorage we had wanted to check out, when a Severe Weather Warning sounded on the VHF announcing a severe storm for our location. We barely had time to clear all our stuff from the cockpit and had just started to put on our foul weather gear, when it hit. The rain came down like a wall of water and the wind was so high it heeled us over as if we had all our sails up. Thankfully it only lasted about 5 minutes. We made it safely into the anchorage and dropped the hook, feeling less exposed to the wind. This is a really nice anchorage, on one side is the Florida International University and on the other, Oleta State Park. It was relatively quiet and the only high rises were in the distance.