Newfound Harbor and No Name Pub
05 February 2011
Friday was another fabulous day on the water. You know the story by now: Comfortable temperatures, mostly sunny and favorable winds. We had just enough wind from the right direction to fly the code zero most of the way from Holiday Isle to Newfound Harbor. Along the way, David saw a 2-foot long fish jump 10 feet out of the water out of the corner of his eye and hollered. Julie turned to look just in time to see the same fish do it again, but she also saw what the wish was after: It was chasing a small fish that had also jumped 10 feet out of the water! That was the last jump we saw, so we assumed the small fish was toast. A couple of hours later, we had to put away the code zero and resort to the noisy diesel engine for the last two hours of the day's journey as the wind died down.
Anchoring is usually a breeze in Newfound Harbor. We have anchored there several times before, but never at low low tide. At 4 pm, we commenced running aground. We were able to successfully run aground three times over the next hour. We were having so much fun running aground, we almost forgot to anchor! The problem was that the water was a foot and a half lower than the charts indicated. We only need 4 ft. of water beneath us, so we stupidly figured that 5 ft. of water would be sufficient. Charts lie! Or the low low tide we had Friday night was abnormally low. We changed tactics and anchored in water that was supposed to be 7 ft. deep. That worked!
Options' next crew of Phil, Karl and Chris will be coming on board Monday in Key West when Brooke and Julie rent a car and drive back to Miami to fly home. As luck would have, they elected to fly out early and were driving down A1A en route to Bahia Honda State Park, a scant 7 miles from Newfound Harbor! We bribed them into picking us up and we all had a great dinner at No Name Pub.
There are other bars and restaurants with dollar bills stapled to the walls and ceiling, but No Name Pub takes the cake. They have layers upon layers of dollars, probably several hundred thousand dollars worth! If you look closely at the picture, you'll see thousands of dollars right behind us. They frown on patrons removing dollars from the wall in order to pay their bills. We asked, just to be sure.
Saturday we slept in and didn't get under way until well after 8 am, knowing it was a relatively short sail to Key West. Once again, the wind gods had blessed us. We enjoyed moderate winds from off of our port beam (sailor talk for wind coming directly from the left side, at 90 degrees to our heading). We sailed at a 6 to 7 knot clip almost all the way. When we turned north to head into Key West harbor, the wind moved to mostly behind us, so we slowed to about 4 knots. I still find it amazing that sails generate lift, like a sideways airplane wing. That allows the wind to make the boat go much faster when it's slicing into the wind at an angle as compared to going to the same direction as the wind. Trivia note: When we went to the Wright Brother's museum at Kitty Hawk a few years ago, we learned that their design for the airplane wing was inspired by sails!
Upon arrival at Galleon's, we had the pleasure of seeing Heather. When we last said goodbye in February of last year, she had been diagnosed with cancer, had limited insurance and was having trouble coming up with the cash needed to start chemo. We contributed to her cause before we left. We got an update that, after two rounds of chemo, the second round being three times as aggressive as the first, the outlook is good. She seemed happy and full of life.