Little Boat in a Big Pond

Lake Worth - Government Cut

We had our first ocean passage and overall it went very well.  We pulled out of Lake Worth inlet with no problems at all. It seemed so simple. The Fort Pierce Inlet must be especially tricky, because we have never gone out there without bucking around like crazy. It was smooth sailing, and we were on schedule to pull in to Port Everglades around 5p. 

We were looking for a place to anchor, and all we could find was a mooring ball at the city marina, so we called them up to see if we could have one. They said yes, and it came with a shower, but I couldn’t take the shower until tomorrow because they were closing at 4:30p. I was pretty bummed at the prospect of a shower being taken away, so when Jacob asked if I wanted to continue on because the sailing was so nice I was all for it! That was a mistake. Although we were on course to make it with 30 minutes of light left, we had to change two filters within a mile of Government Cut. That put us in after dark on our first ocean passage day ever.

Government Cut, a large inlet in Miami, has tons of shipping traffic, which is really scary in the dark. It is hard to describe just how scary the whole situation was. The ships going up and down the channel at night were huge (some in the cruise ship category)! We felt so little and out of place. The anchorage we were shooting for had a bridge before it that was mislabeled on our chart. We thought it was 65’ fixed, but turned out to be 35’ fixed (way too short for our mast). We didn't realize it was so short until we were almost going under, so we had to very quickly put on the brakes and turn around. We were tired and our nerves were frazzled so we decided to try tying to a fuel dock before the bridge and getting fuel there in the morning. As we attempted a tie up, there was a strong breeze into a cement pier which was not forgiving. We couldn’t get away from there fast enough. That left us with an anchorage on the other side of three shipping channels, so we had to play frogger with the giant boats. We finally ended up there at 1a, and it was lovely. We only slept about 4 hours, so we were both exhausted! Thankfully the girls slept through the whole mess!