The Sailing Shipleys

We write this day 6 at sea. The Dry Tortugas National Park is a mere 33 NM away and we are speeding at 6.5kts. It is exciting and both anxiety inducing to soon be within site of land, other ships, shallow waters and dangerous yet stunning coral reefs.

Other sailors have said that a trip from the Florida Panhandle to Key West averages 4-5days. It’s taken us 6-7. We have experienced nearly every point of sail with shifting winds and various sea states.

The first two days put us so far behind our initial prediction we were never going to catch up. The wind was directly out of the south, which was also the direction we wanted to go.

Sailboats are designed to harness the wind. Sails create lift – like an airplane wing – but that means you cannot sail directly into the wind. The sails will flap instead of curve and you will float around in circles annoyed by the endless banging of giant handkerchief sail cloth. To overcome this you must sail at angles to the wind. This means you travel nearly twice the distance to get to your destination than a straight shot. Not a problem when you don’t have anywhere to go…except when the seas are above 5ft with a 4second period. That means pounding into waves nonstop. Moses puked (twice), Jimmy wanted to puke, and soon so did I after discovering our bilge was so full the high water alarm sounded.

Talk about a stressful way to start a passage. Would Moses and Jimmy recover from seasickness? Would we be beating for 4 days straight? Did we have another fresh water leak? Why did everything have to be so damp!?

There were three reasons for our bilge filling. First, we were healed at 25-30 degrees, so much that our sink drain was under the waterline and seawater was coming up through the drain and spilling into the bilge. Second, we are fairly sure our caprail has a leak on the port side. In one compartment near the bow, all of our clothes got soaked from a consistent drip that flowed down our cabinets and into the bilge. Finally, we have not devised a solution to plug up the hole where our anchor chain comes into the boat so water has free access there.

Pounding, beating, going upwind, is not always fun.

It was a relief on day 3 when we finally cleared the shallows off Cape San Blas, and the winds and sea state mellowed. We ate our first real meal and Moses even peed (he is the ultimate camel on passages).

From there we had variable wind conditions. For two days we averaged 5-8kts of wind, changing sails and even taking them down when it disappeared completely and turning on the motor.

As we passed Tampa, a low pressure system moved in north of us and the winds shifted to come from the west and then north and north east. We received our first experience of downwind sailing, contemplating the spinnaker but deciding to pole out the jib, experimenting with different techniques, so it would stay nice and big like a parachute to capture as much wind as possible.

The wind is now perpendicular to us, a beam reach. We are flying, literally! Moses is sitting with his face in the wind like a dog hanging out a car window. It has been a challenging first passage, but we sure did learn a lot.

We learned that Moses will potty eventually, to always wait for better sailing conditions even if you’re itching to go, that we might have a caprail leak, that fishing vessels sometimes anchor in the gulf and can look abandoned, that our AIS works best in coastal waters and picks up other ships within 2-3NM, that our Garmin InReach worked great and we had excellent contact with friends and family, that we still love to sail even on the days it might not be so fun.

29NM to go. Land ho (nearly!)