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Safely back at Marco River Marina!  We traveled 14.5 hours from Marathon to Marco. Whew!

We left Boot Key Harbor at 6:10am and were going under the Seven Mile Bridge (Moser Channel) an hour later. Seas were a little rough, but once we turned north the ride got better. Most of the day we had 18-20kts. of wind on our beam, so happily we made 7kts across the water. We could see the buildings of Marco Island after 10 hours without sight of land. The last four hours were the hardest, as we could see our destination but couldn’t get there any faster. At about the 10 hour mark we also had to take down the sail since we were seeing some small squalls with wind gusts over 25 kts. Doug (we both had life jackets on by then) went to the foredeck to furl the sail. I had to turn the boat  into the wind and hold it there while he tried to strap himself to the boat and get the sail down. It was quite the exciting and scary few moments as the boat was pitching violently and he wasn’t able to get strapped to the deck. He settled for getting the sail down (he didn’t furl it neatly) because he had to get back to the cockpit as soon as possible. Then we manhandled Tara back onto course and continued on. Gene & Kay watched this procedure from Sojourn–you might want to check out his description at    http://oursojourn.wordpress.com    If it’s not there yet, check back later because I think he’s working on his blog right now.

When we were almost to the Marco River Channel, rain started pouring down. By now the sun had set, but we had hoped for a little more visibility after sunset. Because of the rain clouds it got dark pretty fast. We had a slow journey into the channel because the rain made it hard to see the markers. We have a 3 million candlepower portable spotlight that I could search for the markers with and keep them lit up as Doug navigated the channel. We were drowned rats by the time we had docked at Marco River Marina! Since the marina office was closed, we docked ourselves, tied Tara up, and got ready to catch Sojourn as she came into the slip next to us. Our wonderful dockmaster Bruce had earlier given us our slip assignments and left marina keys for us.

We celebrated our long day and arrival with some nachos (made by me) on Sojourn. All of us were filled with a real sense of accomplishment for our successful journey. Also we were all exhausted!  After hot showers, we fell into bed–blissful!

Captain Doug

 

5 -6 ft. seas

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