A Day Sailing on the Caloosahatchee River

Day 5: March 9, 2018
Follow our progress using this link: Steve's Spot

Today was a fun day.  Along the way, Janine and I have been in contact with a friend from Ohio who has a place in St. Petersburg to whom we introduced sailing several years ago.  He keeps his boat in Ohio but accepted our offer to spend the day sailing around the Caloosahatchee River. But I get ahead of myself.

We had a wonderful night’s sleep.  Although the air temp dropped to around 50 degrees outside, we had our little electric heater that kept the cabin of the boat at a warm 70 degrees.  This is a luxury that we will lose when we disconnect from 110 volt shore power and head out to the open waters. Again, we both logged 9 hours sleep. We rewarded our awakening with a great sausage gravy on toast breakfast.

Little Bungalow along the river

The winds were light so our first chore was to hoist the jib and gennaker sails. During the process, our neighboring dock mate came out and we had an interesting conversation.  They had just bought the 26 foot catamaran sailor that they planned to motor up to their permanent port about 100 miles up the coast. The boat had been sitting for quite a while and they were unable to get the motor to run. The boat appears to have been abused a bit but our friends were positive and seem to have what it take to make her a fine craft.

Our friend Tim arrived at around 10:00 and after a cup of coffee and some conversation, we backed out of our small slip and headed out into the wide expanses of the river.  We raised the sails and had a great down wind sail for about 3 hours until the wind faltered and our boat speed dropped to about 1 knot.  We turned about and fired up the motor and headed back to the yacht basin.

Second Wind is equipped with a wind gauge that at is designed to tell both the direction and wind speed.  This one has proven to be an exasperating piece of equipment.  It worked  while when we first bought the boat, then it quit.  I worked on it, got it to work on the trailer only to find that it would not work on the water.  I added new parts, tested, and repaired again and again over the next few years only to achieve the same results.  This year, I didn’t even try.  So, to my amazement, when we raised the mast on this trip and turned on the instruments, the crazy thing worked as designed.  By the time we got to to our slip, the wind speed option had quit but the direction worked.  As we sailed out today, we still had the direction function until about half way though our sail when that part failed as well. 

At noontime, we offered Tim our noon dining options including the skipper’s taco,

We see all kinds of craft in our travels

the first mate’s pulled pork or our Special Prime Spam Rollup with mayo.  Tim had never experienced the Spam delicacy and since he had observed that I was still alive and relatively healthy for my age, he we offered to try it.  Much to his surprise, he found the Special Prime Spam Rollup with mayo most delectable especially when you add the sides of a bag of Fritos and a butterscotch pudding cup. It is our goal to please our guests.

As one might expect, we had an aware group of folks on hand when we arrived back at the marina and as usually happens, the landing was less than stellar.  I did get the boat back into the narrow slip but this time it was with the help of three extra folks.  

We originally planned grilling on the boat, but the group decision was that it would be easier to walk the two blocks to the restaurant district than to drive to the store, buy some grillables, cook them and then clean up. So, we walked.  We settled into a street side table at the Lodge where Janine had fish and chips and I again had ribs.

The blob cake before icing

Back at the boat we felt that Tim needed one more of our boating experiences, so we prepared a blob carrot cake with homemade Betty Crocker icing.  Tim decided he had all of this experience that he could handle and headed back north at around 8:00.  Bed for us came not long after.