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Published: June 17th 2017
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Geo: 26.8364, -80.0527
From Stuart to Lake Worth we spent the first part of the day rather excited about moving south, but after the first hours of sunshine, and good timing on the first few bridges, it started to rain, and then we had to wait for a bunch of bridges. It became a tedious day.
Then there was the one bridge where we were circling for almost half an hour with Simunye. As the bridge final began to open, Simunye didn't follow suit. We kept watching as we moved towards the bridge and they didn't. Then we saw Christa up on the bow preparing to drop the anchor and we knew that they were having problems. At this point we turned around to stay with them and called the bridge to say that we were staying on the north side to stay with our friends. It started to rain.
It turned out that their gear cable had come undone and simply had to be re-attached. With their boat back in business, we waited for the next bridge opening and all proceeded through together. It was now pouring.
This bridge definitely had a curse on us.
As we all proceeded through the bridge span,
in the rain, Inspiration in the lead, OUR engine suddenly lost RPM's. Tony's keen senses told him that we had hit something. I was shocked by this comment because I hadn't felt a "hit". I simply noticed our engine suddenly lost power. Well, the engine gurgled for a bit, and then stalled. Tony tried to re-start it, and it did start in neutral, but stalled when he put it in gear. Yes, Something was in the prop…a rope or stray piece of line perhaps??
As we simply floated, now on the south side of the bridge, Steve left Craig and Christa on Simunye and jumped into their dinghy as Tony jumped into the water. Steve used the dinghy to keep Inspiration out of the middle, but also away from the pilings on the side of the ICW. Tony came back aboard to grab all of his snorkel gear and his dive knife. I spotted Tony while Steve continued to keep us from floating in the wrong direction. Oh, did I mention that by now it was raining? Not raining. Pouring.
Our ordeal didn't last for long. Tony managed to free up the prop and we were underway in no time!
Turns out, we caught a huge tarpaulin. It had wrapped itself entirely around the prop. We had a bit of a laugh, Steve went back to Simunye, and we all continued on. Tony, dripping wet from being in the water, me, semi-wet from standing in the rain.
After those two ordeals, we were pretty happy to drop anchor in Lake Worth at 5pm. It turned out to be a long, cold, wet day. As Tony said that evening, we got through all the bad things in one day! It was probably the worst day I've had on the ICW to date.
We stayed in Lake Worth for two nights. Simunye needed to re-splice their anchor rode to the chain, and we needed to get our dinghy engine working. Unfortunately, after having the Indiantown boatyard do a yearly physical on our engine and then we filled the gas tank only to find out in Stuart that the tank ended up being half water! We still don't know how it happened. But we finally managed to get all the water out of the engine in Lake Worth.
With a planned early morning departure from Lake Worth, we started yet another day of bridges.
The bridges along this part of the ICW are plentiful. And they just aren't timed for sailboats. And then there was the one that was having maintenance done. It simply opened at 11am even though we arrived at 9:30am. So we anchored for an hour and just hung out. So much for our 7am departure!
Without looking at my logbook, I'd estimate that we did ten bridges a day for three days to get to Ft. Lauderdale. At least it didn't rain again.
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