Into the wild blue yonder

April 25

Underwent a crew change last night as Debbie headed home and my former liquor store mentor, USCG Captain and all around good guy Bill Boland joined the crew. He doesn’t look so good in one of those little black nighties that I tend to favor but one does what one must.

Heading out into the Atlantic Ocean. See how the boats “bread crumbs” show a bit of a wiggle pattern? Big boat was screaming in kicking up a crazy wake. Had to give him plenty of room and then turn into his wake to lessen the blow.

Left the marina around 7:30 spent 20 minutes getting to the Atlantic Ocean and headed for the 3 mile marker to take advantage of the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is a river of water that flows between the Bahamas and Florida up the east coast. At our normal cruise engine settings of 1250 rpm’s in flat water we will run about 10-10.5 mph. In the Gulf Stream…

This is like getting 20-30% better fuel economy. You can tell you are in the Gulf Stream by the color of the water. Cobalt blue.

We had a few rough patches when some really large boats waked the heck out of us.

WB has been in 5 foot seas before but this guy even knocked the Yeti off it’s perch behind it.

I can tell we are actually in the Atlantic Ocean, take a look at our depth. This is about 3 miles out.

Don’t want to upset any of my more sensitive readers, but I thought this was interesting.

Coming up on Palm Beach. Mar-A-Lago over there somewhere.

WHAT NEW HELL IS THIS??? Auto Pilot acting up again. In really big water with big waves and swells the circuit breaker is kicking off. The fuses in this equipment are 40 amp. Called the guy who did the install and he is thinking the circuit breaker may be only 20 amp. Will this ever go away?

After running for 8 hours in the Atlantic we came in the Fort Pierce inlet. Not quite the display of yachting we saw on display in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

This is the NEBO report I get from each days voyage. By the time we found our anchorage and got the anchor set we had been at it for 12 hours. Ran 101 miles today.

Notice the Max Speed on the top right? Once in a while it is wise to run up the engine RPM’s to blow the carbon out of the turbochargers. We run the engines at 2200 RPM’s (80% of wide open throttle) for 10 minutes.

We are sharing this anchorage with 3 sailboats.

The anchorage is aptly named “Red Gazebo”.