Happy New Year in Fort Pierce, Florida
We have been enjoying relaxing in Fort Pierce, but are both getting a bit antsy to start moving south again.
For the first time we will have a 3rd crew member when our good friend Ron joins us tomorrow for the next leg of our journey.
We confronted the challenge of transforming the aft cabin from storage garage to comfortable quarters. There is no photographic evidence of this undertaking, but trust us, we were questioning whether it would actually be possible. (The bigger challenge is when we have to convert this cabin from quarters for one to quarters for two when Ron’s wife Sandy joins us mid month. But, we will deal with that later.)
We plan to depart Fort Pierce and make our way down to Key West this week. There are a few different options for this journey and we wrote out 4 different potential itineraries with multiple sub-plans within each. Christina was in planning heaven!
Once we make it to Miami, all plans converge. We looked at weather forecasts and distances to figure out what may work best.
Plan A – we could go inside on the ICW to Fort Lauderdale then pop out to the ocean to get to Miami (we have to go outside on the ocean because there is a bridge between Fort Lauderdale and Miami that our mast probably won’t fit under) – this would take 4 days. Marinas were called to be sure there was slip availability.
Plan B – we could go inside on the ICW to Lake Worth and then pop out to the ocean to either Fort Lauderdale, Miami or Key Largo.
Plan C – we could go outside to Lake Worth and then inside to Fort Lauderdale
Plan D – we could do an overnight passage from Fort Pierce to Key Largo (160 miles and 27 hours)
If we were to do either Plan A or Plan C we would encounter no less than 16 opening bridges in the last 2 days. Most of the bridge openings are timed and some are timed for faster boats and we wouldn’t be able to always make the sequential openings so that could mean that we would have a distance we could easily cover in 20 minutes (but not the 15 for the bridge opening) and have to wait for over a half hour for the next opening. Neither of us thought those would be fun days.
We are both hoping Plan D will work out. Bob got busy charting the route and setting up way points for the passage.
We are keeping our fingers crossed. 