Okay. So its 0300. Our running lights don’t work (although the emergency running lights duck-taped to the pulpit and stern rail are working). Our AIS - which identifies approaching ships by speed, course, and name on our chart plotter - is not working. Our primary marine radio isn’t working right. I am nervous about the engine. However, it seems to be running okay, which is a good thing, because we can’t sail, since the wind is out of the southwest and that’s svery near the course we have to steer to compensate for the Gulf Stream and get across to Lake Worth. We don’t have a life raft - most sailboats don’t. We do have Dimples, but she is tied up on the foredeck, and it would take 5-10 minutes to get her untied, turned right side up, and launched. We do have a hand-heldSPOT transmitter, which enables our family to go on line and see where we are at any given time. SPOT has an emergency button which you push and your distress call and location, will be (they claim) promptly passed on to the call center. Nonetheless, as the lights at West End fade to black behind us, we feel compelled to ask ourselves is this prudent?

Our passage proves to be uneventful. It is a moonlit and calm evening. We sight a ship to the north at 0400. We take a bearing on it, and note over the next ten minute that although the ship is much closer, the bearing is the same. If the bearing is constant, but the range is diminishing, it means you are on a collision course, so we put the helm to starboard and settle on a course of du north, parrallell to the ship (which is heading south). when the ship is abeam of us, she is perhaps, a mile away, and we can see that she is a container sip, her decks all lit up and highly visible. We turn to port, and resume our course. We sight three more ships during the crossing, one of them a big cruise ship which passes astern of us just before dawn, but we don’t have to alter course to avoid them. By 0830, we are well into the Gulf Stream, and the calm flat sea we had enjoyed to that point turns into little two and three foot waves, so the boat begins to roll back and forth on her round bottom quite a bit, but well within our comfort zone. At sun up I lower our Bahamian Courtesy flag, a sad moment. The day is clear and warm.

We check on the Lake kWorth Inlet in our cruising guide, and discover to our horror that on a flood tide, the current can reach 4.0 knots! It had been an easy passage on the way out so we had bothered to check on the current before we left West End. This is annoying because we had considered taking advantage of the Gulf stream’s curren to make entry at the St. Lucie Inlet (which is much closer to Indiantown), but reject this option because of concern that the current in the St. Lucie Inlet can reach 4.5 knots!

And, we run aground at the entrance to the channel. Damn! We did this on the way in the last time! This time, we get off after a half an hour of going forward and then reverse on the engine along with an incoming tide, turning the helm one way and then the other, with only minor exchanges of recriminations. If anyone is keeping track (besides Wiley!) this is our 8th grounding since we left our home port. No harm done!

We drop anchor on the north end of Lake Worth at 1615, and Merry uses our “local boater card option to call U.S. Customs and Immigration in Palm Beach, which gives us a “clearance number” for our log. We are at anchor, at peace, and back in the “good ole USA”! Wiley lowers the “Q” flag.