A Bad Cruising Day

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December 28, 2023: What started as a minor annoyance turned into a bad day on the water, but finished up a lot better than expected.

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I’d dropped anchor on December 27, 2023 at Elliot Key, an anchorage in Biscayne Bay that got high ratings in Waterway Guide. It was a picture perfect day in the Florida Keys with plenty of sun, a light breeze, and warm temperatures. Exactly the kind of day I was hoping for on this trip.

It was somewhat unsettling to be able to see the bottom from the Command Bridge as I maneuvered past the No Wake buoys and the few large sailboats anchored there to get closer to Elliot Key. I could see a beach there that would come in handy for walking my pups and I like to get as close as possible. I’ve learned not to completely trust the charts on my chartplotter or Aqua Map, so I watched the sonar’s depth reading closely. Although I was still quite a way out — which would turn out to be a good thing — I didn’t want to take chances. I brought the boat to as close as a standstill as I could, pointing the same direction as the other anchored boats, then went down onto the bow to drop the anchor.

It was quite an experience to see it land gently in the sand, small rocks and shells, and light covering of weeds. I played out the chain slowly, letting it spread out as the boat drifted backwards with the current. When I got to about 40 feet, I stopped. The boat held in place.

I didn’t put on the anchor snubber. I didn’t see any reason to. It was so calm and the boat wasn’t doing any swinging at all. That might have turned out to be a good decision, too.

I did set the anchor alarm. (I always set an anchor alarm if I’m not securely tied to a dock with at least three lines.)

It was mid afternoon so I had lunch, took my pups to shore, and worked on the blog post I finally published yesterday. I sat outside on the aft deck, inside the screened enclosure. I was happy that the boat was pointing into the sun, leaving the back deck in the cool shade. Every window and hatch on the boat was wide open to let the gentle breeze blow through.

It was as close to a perfect afternoon as I could get on the boat and I felt great about it.

Around sunset, after taking my pups to shore one last time for the day, I went up onto the command bridge with a martini to watch the sunset. I even took a photo and tooted about it on Mastodon. “Martini time off Elliot Key in the #FLKeys. It it too much to hope that the wind and water stay this calm all night?”

Apparently it was too much to ask.

Wake Up Call

Everything was fine on board until around the middle of the night. That’s when the wind picked up and the waves started lapping loudly against the hull and the boat started to swing. It was a gentle swing — not the kind of wild swings I’d experienced at other anchorages the previous week. But it still woke me up. It was nearly 3 AM when I finally got back to sleep.

The anchor alarm went off at exactly 4 AM, waking me back out of a heavy sleep. By then, the wind was blowing hard out of the north — it had been out of the east the day before, leaving the anchorage sheltered by Elliot Key. The boat was moving backwards, on a diagonal path toward land, dragging its anchor with it.

I let out more rode — that’s anchor line, if you don’t know the term. I can do that from the inside helm. I let out the rest of the chain — another 10 feet or so of it — and a good 30 feet of rope. That put me at 80 feet of rode for a scope of at least 10:1. The scope is the ratio of rode to depth and the higher that first number is, the shallower the angle on the anchor. That gives the anchor a better chance to bite into the sand or mud or whatever is down there. (Watch this excellent, short BoatUS video to learn more.) Increasing the scope always gets my anchor to stop dragging.

In this case, it didn’t work. We kept moving backwards.

It was dark out. I don’t like to drive the boat in the dark. But since it seemed as if we weren’t going to stop moving until I grounded near shore, I had to do something. So I started the engine, went out onto the bow, pulled the anchor up, and then ran back inside to motor the boat back out toward the bay.

I’ll make what could be a long story very short: I tried two more times to set the anchor in the immediate area. The first time didn’t set at all. The second time was a bit more successful. It would hold for a while, swinging back and forth, then drag and catch and swing again. It did this multiple times and the last time actually gave me enough time to make myself some breakfast, eat it, feed my pups, and take them to shore in full daylight on a cloudy day. Needless to say, it was a rough ride in the dinghy to shore and back.

When I got back, I secured the dinghy, started the engine again, pulled the anchor, and headed out. It was just after 8 AM.

The First Cruise

Biscayne Bay was a mess of waves and swells one to three feet tall, coming right out of the north to northwest. That put the swells on my beam, which set the boat rocking almost immediately. I tried different speed settings to find something as fast and as comfortable as possible. In the end, I wound up doing what I’ve done before: tack into and then away from the wind, creating a zigzag course. The farther south I got, the worse the conditions got. It’s all about fetch — the farther the wind blows across open water, the bigger the waves it creates. I was moving away from the wind so the waves got bigger as I moved south.

Relief looked as if it were just five or so miles away at a place where the mainland comes close to the Keys, a place called Cutter Bank. There would be shelter from the wind so the waves should settle down. I aimed for the channel marker at the start of the channel there.

Meanwhile, it started raining. Gently, at first, like showers, but eventually very hard. Visibility was reduced to maybe a mile. I started up my radar and overlaid its image on one of my chartplotter screens. It was more for practice than anything else. I’d see any obstruction before I noticed on radar, but I like to occasionally read obstructions on radar so I know what they look like.

I got through the channel at Cutter Bank and, sure enough, the waves calmed down a little. Now I was in Card Sound. It was around this time that the Coast Guard began broadcasting about the Small Craft Advisory for the area and I distinctly remember them mentioning Card Sound.

I continued south and the conditions worsened again. I was tired of it. Things had already slid off the table and the garbage pail had fallen over, leaving the cabin with the smell of coffee grinds. My pups were looking distinctly uneasy. I saw an anchorage up ahead and decided to stop there to regroup and come up with a new plan.

So at about 9:20 AM, I dropped anchor on the sheltered south side of Pumpkin Key, just off the north end of Key Largo.

The Second Cruise

It became pretty clear that I would not be able to spend the night there. First, it wasn’t all that sheltered and the boat was being rocked far beyond my comfort level for what could be 24 hours. Second, I wasn’t sure whether my anchor would hold and I wasn’t interested in playing anchor games on a wildly rocking boat. And third, there was no place near to safely take my pups for their pee breaks.

I consulted all my charts and other resources. There was a channel between the mainland and Key Largo about five miles farther south. The Card Sound Bridge crossed it. After that was Barnes Sound, which was smaller and should be calmer. At the south end of that was a narrow channel that ended at what looked like a very sheltered cove. There was an anchorage there. I’d shoot for that.

So I pulled anchor again and headed south, doing a whole lot of long zigzags to smooth the ride. (You can actually see them on my Nebo path.) I wasn’t able to go very fast, no matter how hard I tried. It was pouring rain by then and all three of my windshield wipers were going. Every time I pointed more into the wind on one of my zigs, huge waves would wash over the bow and splash the windscreen. I know this would have terrified a lot of people, but Ranger Tugs are built to handle rough water so I had no worries at all. The wiper blades were pretty new and everything was working fine.

I crossed under the bridge into another calmer stretch of water. Of course, that didn’t last. Winds were forecasted to be sustained up to 25 miles per hour and gust up to 35 miles per hour. I suspect the forecast may have been accurate. I buzzed through Barnes Sound as quickly as I could. (It was here that my Nebo log stopped suddenly; I had forgotten to plug in the phone I use for tracking, which is the same phone I’d been using for my anchor alarm.) By around 11 AM, I’d passed through that very narrow and very sheltered channel between Cross Key and Key Largo and into Blackwater Sound. I kept to port around the point and got into what seemed to be calm water in Sexton Cove.

I dropped anchor, and tried to set it. It dragged.

I pulled up the anchor, repositioned the boat, and dropped it again in what looked like a more sheltered spot. After a moment, I convinced myself that it was holding and shut down the engine. We’d spend the night there.

Or not.

The very notion of the anchor holding was just wishful thinking on my part. As I was eating the leftovers I’d heated for lunch, the anchor alarm went off. But I didn’t need it to know the anchor was dragging. All I had to do was look out the window. We were dragging backward at a speed of about 1 knot with the anchor likely digging a furrow through the sand and shells and weeds at the bottom as it was dragged along. This would not do.

Third Cruise is the Charm

I looked ahead of us on the charts. There was another one of those narrow channels through the mangroves at the south end of Blackwater Sound. It ended at a place called Tarpon Basin and the reviews of the anchorage there looked good — especially when it came to holding. It wasn’t clear whether there would be a place to walk my pups, but at that point, I didn’t care. I just wanted to be in sheltered water with an anchor that kept the boat in place. I was stressed out and tired.

So I started the boat back up and went out on the bow in the rain to pull up the anchor. I wanted to make sure it was clean and properly stowed, which is something I can’t tell when I pull it up from inside. It came up with a ton of shells and muck and weeds on it. I had to dip it several times — while the boat was drifting backwards, of course — to get it clean enough to stow. Then I hurried down the gunwales, climbed into the aft cockpit, and raced to the helm. I put the boat in gear and headed out again.

More rough water. I passed a sailboat moving in the opposite direction; I had no idea where it had come from. I zigzagged as necessary to keep the ride smooth. And I was thrilled to enter the channel between Boggy Key and Key Largo. I followed the channel makers around the south point of Boggy Key and up into Tarpon Basin. The chart told me that the water was 4 feet deep up against the mangroves on the north side, so that’s where I went, passing another boat a little larger than mine anchored in the middle of the basin. I moved slowly, watching my depth, which never got below 5 feet. When I got within 100 feet of the mangroves in beautifully calm water, I dropped the anchor from inside and gently reversed as I played out chain, hoping to get the anchor set on the first try.

By some miracle, I did.

I played out all 50 feet of chain and another 10 feet of rode. Then I set my anchor alarm with an estimate of where the anchor was, came back inside the cabin, and started to decompress.

It was about 1 PM and we’d traveled about 34 miles. We were still 10 miles short of our planned anchorage, but that was okay with me.

Here’s my Nebo log for December 28, 2023. Download a PDF log file with more info. Track Do It Now on Nebo.

A Great Evening

The wind blew over the top of the boat, affecting it very little. The water stayed pretty calm and got even calmer as the wind died down after 3 PM.

The whole basin looked calm enough to take the dinghy out by 4:30, so I bailed the water out of it, topped off the fuel, and loaded in my pups. It was about a mile to land on the far side of the basin and I wasn’t sure where I was going to land. The water got choppy about halfway there, with 1-2 foot waves that my dinghy didn’t really like and my pups liked a lot less. I finally found a place to land; it was a private boat club but no one was around. (Ask for forgiveness if you can’t ask for permission?) My pups did their business on a gravel area, I cleaned up after them, and we headed back to the boat for the evening.

The rain had stopped around the time we’d arrived and the clouds had broken up nicely. We were treated to an amazing sunset.

This was my reward at the end of a rough day on the water.

I slept very well until around 1 AM when the sound of gentle waves lapping against the hull woke me. I fell back to sleep and slept until 5 AM.

When I consulted the anchor alarm, I was pleased to see that the boat was within 25 feet of its anchor.