First day doing well

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According to my GPS I have 275 miles remaining, which isn’t bad. That means I cleared about 140 nm in a day. However that last night was a bit of stress with shifting winds and moderate seas. Tonight looks to be different. The winds are soft, perhaps 10 kt out of the North. I’m flying drifter only as wing/wing doesn’t make sense, and working the pole was really too difficult. The main was also shadowing the drifter, and the main itself slatted for several hours today. I decided to motor for 2 hours once speeds dropped below 3 kts, partly to get moving and partly to charge the batteries.  The good news is that I appeared to have repaired the previously leaky oil dipstick, so I shouldn’t run afoul of the law for a leaky diesel.

I’ve finished all my leftovers, and I’ll start thinking of cooking a new meal each night. I also want to attempt to make bread, again. Tonight I’ll have a salad of tomatoes, green peppers and  cucumber. While I was motoring I looked out and a whole pod of about 9 or so dolphins were following me. There were quite a few juveniles, and many of them seemed to revel in the sensation caused by the propwash.  I took quite a few pictures of their playful antics, and the water here is so clear you could easily see them beneath the water.

I’m writing multiple times every day to give myself something to do. With a lack of digital internets and people I have to entertain myself. I tried all last night to minimize my OCD compulsion to look outside around the boat and just wait for the radar to beep. Even now I’m only moving at 4 kts and I’ve been inside 10 minutes, and I want to look outside. As if a boat will just pop up in front of me! I haven’t seen a boat all day, nor last night after I passed the tugboat near Destin.

The seas are mostly calm, but occasionally I get hit by a real rocker that rolls the boat a good bit. The motion is still so much better than the Hunter 31 which frequently rolled hard enough to put stuff on the floor. Thus far, even in the 3-5’ seas of last night the motion was easy and for the most part stayed less than 15 deg of heel. Considering the boat is much more behaved tonight, I might be interested in doing more things.

If I consider travelling 4 kts all the way to DTRO, it would have me arriving Monday evening. As I hope to make it into the anchorage with plenty of daylight, I’m hoping the wind will kick up and push me there faster by a knot or so. Given the extended forecast has strong winds out of the east, I’m not sure how I’ll get from DTRO to the Keys. The boring method is to just motor on Hawk’s channel for 70 miles until I get to Key West, and that will drain half of one of my tanks.  A more interesting idea I have is using the gulfstream as a booster, even if I have to tack against headwinds. That will allow me to sail past Key West up into Big Pine Key where I intend to make anchorage. Maybe I should just wait until the weather is a bit more mild? There’s also a nearer anchorage at Sugarloaf that I might avail myself of, but overall I intend to avoid Key West in the boat.

Time is passing strangely, with little to reference against.  I suppose my sleep deprivation doesn’t help either. Hopefully tonight I’ll be a bit more chilled out and can sleep a bit more than before.