It’s good to be fast

We had a great sail today.

When I got up Thursday morning, after sleeping late, the weather was bright and clear, with winds from the north.

Small craft advisories were in effect for this section of the coast, but Slider handles heavy air well, and we were going to be sailing mostly in a relatively narrow waterway that runs east and west, so I thought we’d be okay. The winds would give us a reach down to Pensacola in protected water. My only concern was crossing the mouth of Pensacola Bay, because there were many miles of open bay to the north of the channel. However, the winds were due to ease a little in the afternoon.

When we’d staged to this nearby anchorage the night before, I’d noted a few things that needed attention. I tightened the forestay and the steering lines. I put more tension on the clew outhaul, and stowed my gear. When we poked our noses out of the lagoon, the wind was light, contrary to the forecasts, so I set the jib and settled down to sail. As we reached west up the channel, I noticed a big sailboat about a mile back. This turned out to be the Wand’rin Star of Gulfbreeze, Fl, a 55 foot wooden gaff schooner– a beautiful old girl. In the light air, she soon caught up with us, though she had only her foresail up and was motoring.

Eventually the wind came in fresh from the NNE, and we began to reach down the Sound at 6 to 7 knots. We soon caught up with Wand’rin Star, and I had a pleasant conversation with the owners as we passed.

We would spend the rest of the day exchanging leads down the coast. When the wind fell light enough to slow us below 5 knots, the schooner would catch up. When the wind freshened, we’d move ahead. It made the sail much more interesting to have that small element of competition, and I paid more attention to my sail trimming than I might have if I’d been all alone on the water.

We pulled fairly far ahead during the last few miles before Pensacola Bay, and the schooner put up her jib. She caught us right at the buoy where she would turn north toward her home slip, and my course would continue across Pensacola Bay. We had another pleasant exchange and the owner took a couple of pictures of Slider sailing. These little interactions with other sailors are among the many pleasures of cruising, and it’s particularly fun if you’re sailing in a boat that many would consider eccentric, or at least unusual. When we first passed the schooner, I hollered, “Let’s hear it for the old rigs!” The owner hollered back, “And let’s hear it for the woodies!” I didn’t know what he meant until I got home and looked his boat up on the web. The schooner’s hull was so fair that I couldn’t tell it was a wood boat, just looking at it. The owner did a wonderful job of restoring his 50 year old boat.

Coming down the Sound, we got some pretty good gusts and once we hit a new record for Slider, doing 8.5 knots for a few moments. The interesting thing was that during that burst, I was steering from the leeward hull, with nothing much in the windward hull but a couple gallons of water and the chuck boxes. I had the mainsheet in hand, ready to pop it out of the camcleat if we started to lift a hull, but though the boat got light and the windward bow came a few inches out of the water, Slider didn’t feel at all squirrelly. Every time we go out in heavy air, my confidence in the boat increases.

We stayed on the same tack the whole way, until we had to maneuver up into the anchorage at the end. We were mostly reaching, though we had to harden up a few times to make it past some dogleg in the channel. It was wonderful sailing, the kind of day you dream about when you haven’t been sailing in much too long a time.

We blasted across the southern edge of Pensacola Bay at 7 knots, which seemed pretty fast in the big swells rolling down from East Bay and on out the pass. Slider stayed dry and comfortable, taking only a few drops of spray aboard. I decided to take the Intracoastal cut past Perdido Key, though there is a more direct route between a spoil Island and the ruins of old Fort McRee. But I hadn’t sailed that quicker route since a couple of hurricanes had recharted the bay, and in the strong conditions, I didn’t want to take the chance of running the boat onto a new sandbar at the edge of the Gulf. We crossed a couple of small tide rips that bounced the boat around a bit, and the cut turned out to be a good choice. While passing through, I saw an osprey catch a small mullet. The osprey flew towards us, apparently not noticing that we were there until it was quite close to our masthead, at which point it did a panicky braking-in-midair maneuver and flew away.

We circled around the back of the spoil island and the tip of Perdido Key, until we could enter the shallow slough behind the fort. This area of rich shallow seagrass beds has been buoyed off and combustion engines are prohibited. Slider had no difficulty sailing into this completely protected anchorage, and my first thought was to anchor behind the saddle of land that divides the schooner basin below the fort from the slough behind. But as we approached this shore, a cloud of small black biting flies surrounded us. I sailed back out and finally beached Slider on the point at the north side of the entrance to the backwater, where I hoped the wind would keep the flies off a bit. Unfortunately, the flies were not at all discouraged by this retreat and pursued me in bloodthirsty swarms. They laughed at insect repellent, seeming to rejoice in getting covered with the stuff. I did discover that insect repellent makes great stripping compound, melting paint right off the coamings.

From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. we’d covered 38 nautical miles. Now, had we been in a fast multihull, we could have gone much further in that time, but had we been sailing a typical 16′ monohull beach cruiser, I don’t think we’d have made Fort McRee before dark. I like a moonlight sail on the bay as well as the next guy, but I have to say that the Intracoastal Waterway is no place for a small boat after dark. Small boat sailors are just too vulnerable, not just to the commercial traffic, which is generally unable to change course to avoid a collision, but also to the sometimes-drunk folks running the channels at high speed in powerboats, who may not notice the lights of a small sailboat in time to avoid catastrophe. Cruisers traveling the ICW in small boats should be prepared to find a safe anchorage every night.

Had I been sailing a slower boat, or had the wind not been so cooperative, I’d have been forced to stop somewhere along Santa Rosa Island, which in the usual summer southerlies gives a great lee and is undeveloped wilderness for most of its length. Unfortunately, in the strong northerlies, we’d have had to anchor off the north bank of the Sound, which is well-developed, with almost no public land on which to step ashore. So Slider’s speed was a big factor in getting us to Fort McRee’s terrific anchorages.

Another way to get there would be to launch the boat at Big Lagoon State Park to the west of Pensacola– only a few miles west of the fort. I may do that next time, because the area around Fort McRee and the Pass is so interesting, with easy access to the Gulf and to shallows full of sea life. A small boat cruiser could circumnavigate Perdido Key by sailing east to the pass, out into the Gulf, and back in again at a smaller pass to the west of the park. It would be a great place for a messabout, with big covered pavilions that can be rented for a small fee, and plenty of good camping sites.

I decided to leave the boat on the beach for the night, so that I wouldn’t need to put up an anchor light.

The anchor light I now carry is the same type of little LED camping box light that I converted for my running lights, and it’s really too bright. I hang it high on the forestay, and last night the glare was enough to bother me a little. Besides, the sea grass beds were so luxuriantly thick that the only clear sand to set an anchor was right next to the shore. I sat on deck for a while watching the pelicans fishing, and as many times as I’ve watched them, I saw a kind of behavior I hadn’t noticed before. They’d come in for their usual crash landing amidst a school of baitfish, and then they’d sit there for a while with their bills buried in the water up to their eyes. They’d very slowly raise their heads out of the water, as if expelling excess water from the mouthful of bait, and then they’d throw back their heads suddenly and gulp down their dinner.

As the sun neared the horizon, I took a few nice pictures of Slider on the beach, and then a snapshot of the sun going down over Perdido Bay to the west.

Except for the biting flies, it was a perfect beachorage– flat calm water and not a soul in sight. With darkness, the flies disappeared, for some reason– they might have been hiding from the large dark dragonflies that buzzed me a few times. These were a great improvement, since they had no apparent interest in human flesh.

I heated up the Stroganoff my wife had made and frozen for the trip, and washed it down with a mug of cheap Rhine wine.

After supper I sat in the folding chair on deck and watched the celestial show. The only lights to seaward of this wild and remote-seeming beach were the lights of the bell buoys in Pensacola Pass, just visible on the other side of Perdido Key’s curved tip. Occasionally the wind brought me the faint clang of the bells, a lonely sound. I was very happy that Slider and I were beached in a safe place, and not out on the dark Gulf. Behind me was the loom of Pensacola’s lights, but to the south all I could see was the Milky Way’s river of light. I saw several shooting stars as I watched.

I put on some good old jazz, but the shallows around me were so full of life that after a while the sounds of the fish splashing, hunting, and fleeing merged with the music. Eventually I dozed off. The sound of a school of bait fish scattering across the surface sounded in my dream like a school of mermaids raking their fingers through the water, their hands clawed, their fishy faces angry.

I woke in startled bemusement, and went to bed.

There I was, all alone on my fine little boat, in a wonderful spot. What could be better?

And tomorrow would be another day of good sailing.