Staging: A Good Way to Begin a Cruise

“Staging” is the eminently sensible idea of starting a cruise with a baby step. It’s a notion most eloquently proposed by the notable cruising writer Bruce Van Sant, and it’s truly a good approach.

If setting out on an ocean passage, the prudent mariner may stage to an anchorage convenient to the first big jump-off point– an inlet near blue water for example, and away from the hassle and distractions of the last port. It’s a chance to get settled, get supplies packed away, scrub the bottom, put away the anchor chains, and generally get ready for sea.

For the coastal cruiser, staging to a nearby anchorage the first night is an equally good idea. I don’t always observe this sensible custom, but when I do, I’m always glad I did. For a cruise of several days’ duration, it gives the sailor a chance to sort out the boat while you’re still close enough to home to get help easily if some large problem crops up– say, for example, you forgot the fishing rods.

Here in Fort Walton Beach, we have an excellent staging area for cruises west toward Pensacola and Mobile.

About 5 miles west of our home slip is a string of spoil islands along the Intracoastal Waterway. Between these little islands and the big barrier Island is a wide peaceful lagoon, well-suited to shallow draft boats. The protection from wakes and northerly winds is perfect, and even if a barge or other large vessel lost its way, it couldn’t get very far into these wonderful but shallow anchorages. Big Santa Rosa Island protects these lagoons from south winds and the Gulf. It’s a near perfect spot to spend a night or a weekend. The spoil islands are uninhabited, and on weekends a number of folk will camp out here– see my cruise with my sons back in July.

It’s also a perfect first stop on a cruise.

I write this on Wednesday evening, September 24.

Slider and I are resting behind one of those small spoil islands. These islands are little more than sandbars created by dredging the channel to the north, but they were created many decades ago, so that now the more substantial ones support a few struggling trees, some of them quite large.

The lagoon is to the south of the spoil islands, between them and the big barrier island that runs all the way west to Pensacola Pass. We’re anchored close to the reed beds that fringe this side of the lagoon. The shallows near the reeds are full of life– in the dark the silence is broken by the happy plop of jumping mullet, and the more ominous chugging sounds of feeding redfish.

Unfortunately the silence is also broken by the roar of planes practicing their touch-and-go landings at nearby Hurlburt Field. The only other drawback to the anchorage are the towboat captains pushing strings of barges up and down the Intracoastal Waterway. The island protects us from their wash, but not from the towboats’ zillion candlepower searchlights, which seem to light us up every time a barge string thunders past.

Still, apart from the noisy planes and nosey captains, the anchorage is almost ideal as a place to stage for the big sail tomorrow. As the evening progresses, both noise and searchlights die down. We’re lying well to a single anchor off the port bow. Slider suffers slightly from a flaw common to multihulls– her lightweight hulls want to sail in a stout breeze. but her unusually low windage, for a cruising cat, greatly mitigates this flaw. Tonight she’s lying so steadily, despite the fresh breeze, that I don’t even bother to bridle the rode. When I look through the second tree in the nearest clump, I see the red warning lights of a radio tower caught in the lower left branches, and there they will stay all night long. By a happy coincidence, we arrived at low tide, so we can be assured that tomorrow morning at high tide there will be plenty of water under us to ease our exit from the lagoon.

The cruise didn’t get off to the greatest start.

I wanted to leave in late afternoon, when my wife would be home from work and able to drive the trailer home from the neighborhood ramp where we usually launch Slider. The launching went fine, as usual, but I realized I’d forgotten to load the fishing rods. My excellent wife went home to get them, but when she came back, no one actually thought to put the rods aboard until I was steering for a 15 foot wide cut in the seawall– at which point my sons shouted that I’d forgotten the rods. We were barreling downwind, with no room to turn before we hit the wall, so I yelled for them to meet me at a nearby public water access, a sand flat where Santa Rosa Sound opens up into Choctawhatchee Bay. The wind was blowing 15-20, with lots of whitecaps on the bay. But my sons waded out onto the flat with the rods, apparently not nearly as concerned as I was that I’d run them down in the rough conditions. Fortunately Slider is very docile when feathering up into the wind, so I was able to get close to them while killing the speed. John grabbed the starboard bow while James stuck the rods in their holders, and finally I was off.

A big barge string was racing me to Brooks Bridge, and it was somewhat unnerving to sail beside that wall of rusty steel. I luffed up and let him go through the bridge first, and then the wind eased a little and he steamed away. The sun was touching the horizon when we cleared the bridge. I put out my ultra-cheap LED running lights, and though this is completely subjective, they seemed a lot brighter than the Coast Guard approved lights on my last boat.

Another big barge string caught up with me as I exited the dogleg at the Narrows, and I dodged out of the channel onto the flat, where he couldn’t run me down. There was nothing to hit but sandbars, a possibility which struck me as a lot safer than sharing the channel with a towboat. This is one important way shallow draft boats can be safer than longer-legged ones that can’t leave the channel without disastrous consequences.

It was dead dark before we reached a familiar pass into the lagoon behind the islands. The wind dropped for a bit, and we slid easily into the smooth flat water. I sailed back east far enough to be away from any wakes refracting through the pass, and let the anchor go.

After I’d called home and let my family know I’d survived, I set up a folding chair on deck, and sat back to take in the night. It was cool enough that I went rooting through the clothing drybag to find my REI fleece. I made a cup of hot chocolate and added a judicious shot of cherry brandy.

It’s a glorious evening now, with stars bright over the Gulf of Mexico, and a stiff enough breeze to keep away the mosquitoes. Just to the east is the wreck of a houseboat sinking into the reeds, a fact that only became apparent when the towboat searchlights lit up the shoreline. It’s a little creepy. My friend Del Stone, the horror writer, once penned a story about flesh-eating zombies that rose out of this very body of water to attack picnickers on these very islands. Thinking about this, a vivid fantasy about the living dead hiding aboard derelict boats bloomed in my mind’s eye. It was, I thought, a shame that my kids weren’t here– I could make up a scary story about live-aboard zombies. When the kids were younger, we went camping a lot, and we always told ghost stories around the campfire. I still haven’t finished the one I started at Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee, but it involved frozen human heads bounding down the trails that led up into the surrounding mountains, and that converged on our campground.

A lonely anchorage is a great spot for that sort of wide-ranging thought– replaying good memories and planning future adventures.

My fingers are getting tired from scribbling in the log, so it’s probably time to get out the self-inflating mattress and the down sleeping bag. It’s only supposed to get down into the 50s tonight, and there’s no chance of rain, so I’ll just stretch out on the center deck and not bother setting up the tent. The stars will keep me company, and the slight rocking of the boat in the rippling wavelets will soon put me to sleep.

Staging to a nearby anchorage is almost always a great way to start a cruise.

Even if you begin your cruise in the morning instead of the late afternoon, it’s still a good idea. You can put up your shade awning, let the kids splash in the shallows, relax, eat well, and get organized. In the morning you’ll be ready to start the real cruise.

Tomorrow I’ll sail west toward Pensacola Pass, about 38 nautical miles from here. We should have a fast reach down to the schooner basin at Fort McRee, if the marine forecast holds up. I’m excited!

Now it’s bedtime.