Aw, s__t!

Well, today did not turn out at all like I had planned, and we ended up in a place I did not want to be doing things I did NOT want to do.


Our anchorage at the power plant was well protected from winds and wave action, but it was not at all protected from completely clueless/aggressive boaters, both in the nearby channel and from the trailer boats going to and fro from the nearby ramp.

In order to anchor in the confines of the chosen area, we more or less had to raft up because two of us swinging around at separate anchors would have been iffy. However, two large boats rolling into each other from big-boat wakes in the channel could do some serious damage to each other had we not had large fenders and, in a couple of cases, physically pushed the boats apart.

The smaller wakes from the trailer boats were a nuisance, but not dangerous to us. Sometimes I thought the jerks in these vessels were purposely zooming as close to us as possible with wakes as large as they could make right out of the ramp area out of some kind of class-envy or annoyance at our being close to their ramp. At other times I saw people zoom right up to the area of the ramp creating turbulence for themselves as well as for other boaters preparing to get their boats out of the water. Too bad some local waterway law enforcement couldn’t have had an officer there for the day. A lot of reckless boating tickets could have been written.

Something kept me awake after about 1:30 AM, and I finally gave it up and got up and dressed to check out the weather when the GPS anchor alarm went off – it was set for a very tight position and was just beeping because we had swung around from the spot we had sat in for about 8 hours. We were swinging around quite a bit as the surrounding thunderstorms, flashing threateningly all around, pushed winds in from different directions. We luckily got no direct hit, just some rain, but at one point I saw the anchor buoy I had attached to our anchor to mark our anchor for the trailer boats disappear under the boat. Since it did not reappear, I figured it had gotten hung up on our running gear, and now I began to worry about the buoy’s line pulling the anchor loose! I normally hate using anchor buoys, and I never seem to have good luck with them.

While roaming around the decks of both boats looking for the darned buoy or its line, I woke Jim and Jackie. Jim eventually ended up jumping into the dark water where he found the buoy submerged and entangled in the anchor chain. He also found our keels were now about three inches off the bottom (we were at low tide). We removed the buoy and had no more issues in that regard and soon swung into deeper water.

While it was still dark and too early to begin our anticipated run in the open Gulf to Cedar Key, I began to surf the weather sites on the internet that I use to figure out good Gulf-crossing days. I soon found that the bad weather expected to move across from Texas later in the week was having some advanced effects NOW and that our weather window had slammed shut in our faces. I found that for the second leg of our crossing Cedar Key to Dog island that we would run into ever-increasing wave heights and 70 percent chance of thunderstorms – way to risky for pleasure boats.

We ended up running several more miles up the Anclote River to Tarpon Springs where we ended up at the same pier we used over a month ago on our way south – not where I wanted to be. I expect we may be here a number of days while the nation’s weather sorts itself out.

This delay has used up all the remaining slack we had in our schedule to get home by 4 May, and in order to get Mary to very important family obligations beginning next Monday, we now must rent a one-way car for her so she can get home and prepare to travel onward from there. Unfortunately, there is nobody in the Tarpon Springs area willing to rent one-way, and we will have use the Enterprise rent-a-car we got today (for local running about) to take her to Clearwater where Avis will rent her a one-way. She will depart Thursday morning and visit Florence in Lake City that night and arrive home Friday.

While not happy about running the boat alone all the way from here to home, but with Seminole nearby, all will be fine, since I do most of the conning (boat driving to the uninitiated) anyway.