The Miserable Mile is a stretch of super busy waterway near Ft Myers with an incredibly narrow channel. Powerboats fly this way and that, wakes churn the water, and straying from the channel even a few feet means running aground. In short, it’s quite aptly named!
Storms are scary on a boat. Your entire home rocks around like a whirly-gig, and you’re never quite sure if it’s going to stay put, or go careening off and crash into rocks, land, or another boat! Up until now, we’ve been securely tied to a dock whenever a storm has hit. This is our first time at anchor.
In this episode we continue south on a beautiful downwind day sail from Venice Beach to Boca Grande Pass, then spend a few days anchored at Cayo Costa State Park. We noticed a couple of younger cruisers drop their anchor next to us, so we dropped by to say hello.
While cruising down the west coast of Florida, we run into a few obstacles: Our power runs out without all of our solar panels up; a navigation mistake results in us finding the bottom(!); and working while traveling is just plain complicated. But hey, it’s all good fun!
Where as April and May were normal-ish, June was an absolutely wild ride: It completed our first full year living aboard the boat; we bought a van and named him Chip; we hauled the boat out of the water for hurricane season and drove north to help Lauren's parents move out of her childhood home, and attended our first electronic music festival.
Imagine what one week of cruising looks like, and you’ll never get two identical weeks. BUT— if we had to pick one, these 7 days are pretty typical of our cruising life.
April and May were odd months if we were "normal" cruisers. But since we consider ourselves more 'slow travelers' who happen to live and work on a sailboat, it was just more of the same for us.
While we made good progress south in the month of March, April took a bit of a strange turn when we realized that our raw water pump was leaking. It was a costly repair, and still without a reliable dinghy and motor we decided it would make much more logistical sense to be in a Marina.
After months spent mostly at docks, we venture out to live on the hook (which happens to be less than a block away from a grocery store, but hey, baby steps). This one has a little bit of everything.
We left Mobile at the beginning of the month and officially began our saltwater cruising. We continued our spendthrift in March after having stocked up on food, and wrapping up all of our planned upgrades. It was good to be on the move and good on our pocketbooks as well.
