A day off in Apalachacola.

Today being Saturday, it was lovely to get up late (around 7.45am) turn on the heaters and make some muffins before showering and getting on with the day. We had a hot chocolate with breakfast this morning.
I had somehow been making muffins all night! Sheesh...why??
I think this might have come about because I had looked in the freezer and discovered that I had no muffins to call upon for snacks for our long night on the Gulf.
Anyway....upon getting  up and pulling drapes, I found it was a glorious day, and the light was perfect for those early morning photos. I armed myself with two cameras and shot outside. Not before putting my down jacket, that is.

We are directly in front of this old waterfront store house, which, by the way, is For Sale!

On the other side of the boat we look out on the glorious marshes with all the bird life.

Behind us are some Houseboats and a store of some kind.

Not a good photo, but this Eagle was terrorizing the ducks and other waterfowl, and screeching fit to be tied.

 

Here we are from the dock, so that you can see the relationship to everything I just mentioned.

Robyn and Dave's 50ft Menorquin (made in Menorca, Spain) sitting in front of us. They use their folding bicycles all the time, they said. We have thought of getting some ourselves. Not made that decision yet. We walk everywhere otherwise....

...and pull our little red cart. Waz is ahead of me on our way to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket about 8 short blocks down Hwy 98, this road.

We soon took our jackets off and then our sweaters. It was so hot on the sunny side of the street.

All decked out for Christmas!

Love the phone booth with 'weathered' phone book! One of the few phone boxes that we have come across that actually has the appliance in place.! THAT is significant!!!

 

 

Of course we passed the 'Dead Center' of town

 

This is a very historic cemetery.

Don't you love the name of the Supermarket???and they had their own Smokehouse!

On the way home....Frosty had died in the heat!...

...and I fell in love with this little electric car. Perfect for a lovely little town like this

More Christmas decking.

The Liquor store is directly opposite.

And this is very decorative, next door to the Liquor store.

See the red mark on the wall? New county regulations say that is where the finished floor level will be on this old building because of storm surge during hurricanes.

When we asked the Harbormaster today, why there were no bathrooms down our way, he said it was because they couldn't build down at the dock level, and would have to make the building so high as to be unsuitable.

They wanted to charge us $1.50 per foot for the rent of the dock for the night (well, PER night) but we argued that everywhere we have been so far we have paid only $1.00 per foot, and we had all the amenities  such as laundry, bathrooms with showers, trash pick up etc. He seemed to take our complaints personally, but we stuck to our guns and were eventually charged only $1 per foot.

 

One of the things we love about this town is that they have gone out of their way to preserve the Historic buildings and indeed the history of the place which is significant.

 

We went by the Maritime Museum this afternoon, after paying for our dock, and talked to a young woman there who originally came from Carrabelle. She was happy to talk about the various Hurricanes that had come through the town and the area, because we had asked.

 

We shared a captains basket (shrimp, oysters, and fish) at a family run grill, for lunch, and shared a Key Lime Pie for dessert. As I have said before, we should just order one meal and share everything, that way we don't walk away groaning.  It worked! We did go for a walk around town afterwards, and down to the far end of the town to other docks to see if we could find any more 'Loopers', but we didn't see any there.

Earlier, while on our way back from the supermarket, we saw a couple who looked like they might be boaters...yes! and not just boaters, but 'Loopers'. We met Charlie and Kim, and were invited to come down and talk to them on their boat. We did, as they were parked right beside the Harbormasters door.

They are finishing their Loop in Palm Beach, and because they have a fast boat..(48ft SeaRay) which does 20knots, they are doing their Gulf Crossing during daylight hours. They offered us the charts for Georgian Bay, Canada, and I think we might take them up on their offer. They are selling their boat and returning to Seattle, WA, for Christmas. They had a professional Captain on board with them to help them cross. He just happens to be Charlies ex-brother-in-law, too:)

 

Like others we have met, they will cross their wake, as the saying goes, meaning they are back where they started their looping journey, once they get back to West Palm Beach. Dave and Robyn are trying to figger out what they will do once they tie up at their dock in Longboat Key Marina, Sarasota, FL.

They have a cottage in Nth West New York, Batavia, more precisely, and will go back there at the end of their journey. We share many traits with them, as we do with so many other liveaboard boaters...funny that!:)

 

We are going to have breakfast with them across the road at café con Leche, and then wait for them to refuel further up the dock, before making our start to the Gulf crossing.

We are headed towards Carabelle, but will not go to the township there, turning into East Pass to go between Dog Island and St Georges Island and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

The trip will begin here at around noon, and we should be at East Pass by around 3pm at the latest.

This puts us where we should be for the beginning of a long night of travel across the 'pond' to Tarpon Springs where we have booked the night following.

 

WE don't quite know yet how we will pass the time...19 hours non-stop motoring...but I made a Pasta e Fagoli (Italian Bean soup) for the trip and some new choc. chip, ginger, pecan cookies.

Waz has 'fixed' the autopilot so we don't anticipate having to 'steer' the whole way. Lets hope she behaves, and we don't have to do that. It would make for a looooooooong journey.

We will sleep well tonight and wake refreshed and ready to go tomorrow.

Saying our prayers that we are well prepared, as are our companions, and that we have a safe and uneventful journey.

 

Au revoir, see you on the 'other side'.

 

 

 

 

Panama City to Apalachacola - Nov 29/30th

Waz said yesterday that if we had to characterize our trip to date what would be the outstanding features?
We concluded that they would be the fantastic people we have met, the huge numbers of Dolphin and the shallow waters inside the Barrier Islands along the Gulf Coast.

Yesterday coming from Panama City through the narrow channels to Apalachacola was one of the more nail-biting days we have spent.

 

This photo of the Chart on the chart plotter shows the channel in white that we had to travel along, and the numbers on each side in darker blue show the depth of the water around us.

On these channels you have to stay between the red and green markers (middle of the photo), but sometimes the channel is shallow towards the red, and sometimes towards the green, and sometimes it isn't very deep in the middle either.

This is how we traverse some of these channels.

 

Waz is steering, and I am concentrating on the chart plotter screen (as above) and calling the numbers that show on the depth sounder screen to the left of this picture (not shown here). So it will go like this...

Mon: OK, a little more to starb'd....but small...you are in 6ft of water here....

Waz: Ok!

Mon: SHIT! it's only 4.5ft!!!!!

Waz:..no answer, just throttled Riiiiight off and corrects whichever way he thinks might get us back into something deeper, which is anyone's guess at this stage.

 

Back into 6ft of water is relative safety. We draw 4.6ft (that is the depth from our water line to the bottom of the lowest point on the boat. That is how much water we need to float.

 

It makes me Very NERVOUS when we are going through a narrow channel and there is only 1 -2ft of water on either side of the channel and we can see waves breaking over the sand not far from the boat.

 

By the time we reached deeper water (it's relative) the knots in the back of my shoulders and neck needed readjusting. I did Waz's for him, and though he always appears cool as a cucumber, he had knots in his shoulders that needed work, believe me!

 

We got out of bed relatively early to leave Sun Harbor Marina, Panama City, because we wanted to be ON the fuel dock for 8am when the Marina office opened.

We managed a Yoghurt, banana and muesli breakfast along with the obligatory tea, and our usual morning routine which is always helpful, before making our girl ready to leave the poles.

 

Waz expertly got us from our dock to the fuel dock and we were ready for Monika, when she came back to the boat with Waz to start fuelling. One problem..she had forgotten to turn the pump on in the office. Being a bitterly cold morning, this meant she had a long walk along the dock back to the office, then back to the fuel dock for us to start the process.

Leaving behind the Sun Harbor Marina. I cant say it is a sad leaving, as we didn't have much interaction with the staff or other boaters in this marina, the way we have in other marinas. Still, it was a good safe harbor when we needed it for three weeks, and we have enjoyed our tiki tours.

 

I had heard on the radio, while waiting for fuel, that a ship was entering the channel to make it's way up to Panama City...so I knew we would encounter it before long...perhaps not quite as close as we did!

I didn't open the plastics to take a photo, as this was 8.30am and freezing cold, so some of these pics you will have to bear with me and accept the interference of the plastic in the view.

This tug was parked right alongside of us for a few days, at the entry to the marina. This is where the Osprey was perched:)

On this chart photo, you can see that we are motoring alongside the dock on our port (left) side, out to meet the ICW channel. We met the ship at about where the two lines meet. This, on the left, is the Port of Panama City.

Down the West Bay is a Paper Mill. Warren says it smells just like Kawerau, in the middle of the Nth Island, NZ...like old cabbage! We were often downwind of the smell!

Boat building at the eastern end of East Bay

Saying goodbye to East Bay and into the Wetappo Creek. The creek went on forever, seemingly and was fine for the most part, but we had to be careful in places, especially crossing  lake Wimico.

We are actually on the Jackson River which morphs into the Apalachacola River just past Lake Wimico. The Lake was a very stressful place, due to the shallow waters.

 

Along the way we passed the entry to Port St Joe Canal, which takes you off the ICW and down the canal to Port St Joe, strangely enough:) We had gone to Port St Joe on our tiki-tour to Apalachacola in the car. Not much there, but we knew there would be a dock for the night should we ever need it. This is a bit of a back stop.

 

Lots of fishermen at the confluence of the ICW and the canal, and we were forced to drop our 9.4knots down to no wake. We notice that the fishermen themselves appear to have no qualms about sloshing their own kind around in their wakes as they speed everywhere to get to the next fishing spot. What were we worrying about then? It is called Common Courtesy, we believe.

 

Waz kept trying to give Dave and Robyn a call...these folks had talked to us on the Loopers site about joining forces to cross the gulf together. We had no cell phone coverage at all at this stage.

 

It is a gorgeous day, the light is pretty  winter light, the water sparkles and it is a 'good to be alive' kind of day...but then, isn't every day?:)

I love the marshes and the surprises they show...like a walkway!

 

Nothing like pulling your boat up into a marsh...well, not quite...there was a dock there, it just doesn't look like it from here.

Signs of civilization! Im not sure why we call it that??

Yes, that is a fisherman in a canoe....and here he is up close and personal. We did slow down so that he didn't fall off his perch.

He was casting, Fly Fishing-style onto the very edges of the marsh. I wonder what his target fish was? We were a bit afraid his line would catch the boat as we went by,

 

We spent some considerable time going slow. Even though we had a distinct time frame from Panama City to Apalachacola, you cannot go fast when it says go slow.

 

 

Here we are on the chart (middle) going through the Creek. This, below is what the creek actually looks like!

Fishermen everywhere in some places, then we wont see them for another 10 miles, then we know we are near a town again by the number of fishermen.

The light is soft and the water is gorgeous. It looks blue, but is very brown and full of tanins.

The winter skeletons along the bank.

Our wake can be quite picturesque

This is an Eagle nest, high up in a dead looking tree. Their nests are relatively compact in comparison to the Osprey nests.

 

 

 

These ducks could hardly fly, so they were literally flapping their wings and running across the surface of the water. They were so fat, I wonder if that was the reason?

This little 'Island' in the middle of Lake Wimico had a flock of birds on it's outer eastern side. Rather pretty in the light.

Waz has hurt his forehead AGAIN. There is another wound up in the hair line...and here, below, is the culprit.

The aerial for the AIS (Automatic Identification System).This tells other boats who we are and US who they are. It works really well when you cant see the other boat with your own eyes, but you can see them on the chartplotter.

I could bore you with these kinds of photos for a long time. The still air, winter light, etc etc..:)

 

Going through yet another shallow lake

The light on our wake is lovely.

An Osprey nest on one of the green markers. Their nests are distinctive in that they are very messy and usually much lower than Eagle nests.

 

 

Green is always on our right or starb'd side going out. It is only on our port or left side coming in, which means that the red marker will be on our left normally, but right coming back in...the saying goes...Red Right Returning, in order to remind you. That is for the USA. NZ is different again. However, when we were travelling up East Bay, the definition of when you were coming into and going out of the bay, changed at a bridge, and was initially a little confusing.

Another 'oxbow' (loop) at the confluence of the Jackson and Apalachacola Rivers...and more super shallow canal to follow through the red and green.

This now disused Rail bridge had nice deep water (more than 20ft) through the pass and on either side of it, soon going back to shallow of 8-10ft.

Just to be equal, this Osprey nest is on a red marker:)

This is the end of our voyage to Apalachacola. We parked behind our Gulf crossing buddies, Dave and Robyn, in their gorgeous 50ft Spanish boat  at the town dock at just before 3pm, as you can see on the chart. Our timing was perfect, even though we had to throttle back so many times for No Wake zones. Well done!

 

Robyn and Dave were eventually contacted and bless them, they were there at the Dock waiting for us, to help with the ropes. Always nice to have a hand. The wind was blowing us onto the dock, so we had few problems.