Stars, Sails - the Parallax View

A family of astronomers at sea... coming soon to a galaxy near you...

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25 November 2012 | Fort Myers, FL
07 November 2012 | Fort Myers, FL

Okeechobee Waterway: St. Lucie River, Lock, and River Forest Marina

28 July 2012 | River Forest Marina, St. Lucie Canal, FL
Heather / sunny and 97F / var
It gets hot here during the day. Duh aye, Captain Obvious... Just sayin'! This is Intracoastal Waterway travel, a long motor down almost-straight dredged channels through wide rivers that are anywhere from 6' to 1' deep if you are not in the channel.
Birds are a good indicator of shallow, or no, water
Standing birds are a good indicator of shallow, or no, water

Sometimes the tide or river current is with you, or against you, or pushes you sideways. Generally, it's hot and not very breezy, no waves except those thoughtfully provided at intervals by certain power boats (we're lookin' at YOU, Lazy Daze! Coast Guard Auxiliary my tender butt!), or the occasional tide-against current rip.

Good dryer, bad dryer and other useful tips
Nonetheless, I do have a couple of useful things for the cruiser who might find him/herself at the Fort Pierce Municipal (or City) Marina. Cobbs' is the air-conditioned two-story restaurant at the corner of the marina property closest to the street. They have a "tiki bar" appendage, not air conditioned, facing the marina. But if you are going for open air, Cobbs' Landing, the tiki bar restaurant on the actual marina breakwater, is the way to go: breeze if there is any, and views of the water in both directions, east onto the Indian River and west into the marina (and palm trees and sunset, if you like). Good food, too, and by the standards of Bahamian restaurants it's very reasonable, which is to say the burgers are actually good quality and $8.50 rather than $15 :-) This is by hearsay, of course: I had a salad! Seriously, the seared tuna salad is excellent, and you get kind of starved for proper salads in the Bahamas (they also get expensive since everything is imported). You'd think tomatoes at least would grow there... but maybe it's not reliable enough for most restaurants to use the locally-grown produce.

So, in addition to good places to catch food (speaking of catching food, more fish shots of Derek and Grant will be on previous entries in the next day or so), there is LAUNDRY. That actually washes with hot and warm and all. That costs only $1.25/load and has a side-loader for the same price! Things to watch: the side-loader will start rocking violently if the load gets unbalanced. They have shimmed it, but for best results you may have to lean on it during the final extraction spin. The dryers are interesting: two newer ones and two older ones. From the door, currently, it's new-old-new-old. I put one load into the newer one nearest the door, and one into the older "Commercial" one, and the one by the door dried its full load in the time you get for the $1.50 startup fee. The second one in (older dryer) did not. Hope that saves somebody else $1.50 or more :-)

Water is free at the Fort Pierce City Marina. In the Bahamas it was anywhere from $0.15/gal to $0.40/gal and wasn't always tasty: Spanish Wells's Yacht Haven being an example of water with a funky taste.

Good buoy! Or at least, very serious buoy...
Now for the navigation issue: there is active dredging and spoils-piling going on just upstream (south) of the channel into the Fort Pierce City Marina. There is a small two-color buoy in the center of the entrance channel to the Fort Pierce City Marina. That channel is well-marked with red and green post markers, BUT WATCH for the small, green-over-red buoy in mid-channel, partway in (just inward of the second set of markers, when we came through yesterday). Looks a bit like a fish-pot float. Normally, with green-over-red, you treat it as "green preferred," but ostensibly you can take it on either side. NOT THIS ONE. We are a catamaran. The tidal range is not all that large in this location, and we hit the silt when I tried to just follow the posts and treat the buoy as "optional." It's not optional, unless you draw LESS than 2' 10" -- fair warning! Naturally, we were not going very fast, so reversing out of it was no problem, but how annoying after all these sea miles :-)

OK, after that little shock, we chugged placidly southward along the Indian River, with a local charter fishing boat (called Catch 22: gotta like that) playing hopscotch with us: we chug, he brings his pontoon boat up next to the next marker, they fish all around the piling, we chug past, they zoom up to the next marker after that, and so forth for miles. Sometimes there is a small breeze from the east. I set up a 12V clip-on-fan in the cockpit.

Keeping Flies off your food
Derek made pancakes: yum. Also very nice that there seem to be fewer flies here, they don't swarm your plate instantly the way they often did in the Bahamas. We bought a can of Sterno after seeing it used to chase away flies at a table in a very nice outdoor restaurant there. You'd think the last thing anyone would want would be extra heat, but the fly-chasing benefits of a can of Sterno burning like a mood candle - at noon - on your table vastly outweigh any tiny heat increase!

Followed the waterway, and when the markers are buoys (in the inlet at Port St. Lucie, because the shoaling changes position often), follow the buoys, not your GPS/chart. They aren't all that different, anyway. A couple of the bridges we went through on the way to the St. Lucie Canal had a different arch marked as the one to go through than the actual arch so designated (by wooden sidings -- and a light hanging down in the center of the arch so people won't smash up the expensive bridges at night). In one case, there was a fishing pier build right across the arch that our GPS plotter indicated as the pass-through. Those chart folk might want to look into that...

It was actually a relief entering the St. Lucie canal, which is not as subject to shoaling as the preceding parts of the St. Lucie and Indian rivers. We chugged now in a smaller setting, the canal many yards wide rather than a mile or more, past some very expensive-looking real estate (lasers, robotic guard dogs... OK, I'm kidding about the dogs. I think.). And finally we reached the St. Lucie lock. We love the lock-keeper, we were struggling to make it for the 3 pm opening and he and the cruising boat ahead of us (who were heading in to put their stepped-masted sailboat onto the hard for hurricane season) waited a few minutes as we chugged frantically toward them. OK, maybe they just took their time setting up the lines to the other boat: we love them anyway!!!

In the lock, you and your fenders (big pillowy plastic inflatable things - usually - that you hang out to keep docks from smashing your hull) are up against a concrete wall and looking waaay up to the lock-keeper, who throws down a bow line and a stern line. You need a line handler for each line, usually. You pass the line around one of your cleats, and keep tension on it manually, because it's about to get 12' too long.
a long way up
It's a long way up

Of course, some line handlers are too macho to use cleats...
Grant was the bow line handler

The lock's downstream doors close
closing

and the upstream doors are opened just a bit to let is a little waterfall, and swirly, currenty things happen as the water starts to rise,
swirly, currenty things
Swirly, currenty things. Cleats, lad, use the cleats...

and you keep pulling that long line through the cleat in order to keep your boat near the wall, and eventually the process is complete and hey, you're looking out onto a nice green lawn over the now-low wall of the St. Lucie lock!
Am I rising? Or is the land... sinking???
Am I rising? Or is the land... sinking???

the nice green lawn
The nice green lawn

Chugging on just a bit west of the lock, there are free docks, which are nice, but we wanted to be sure of getting power, since it was 97F in the boat. So we chugged a little farther, and into the River Forest Marina, which is really a holding facility for clever people's yachts during hurricane season. Mostly powerboats in the 50' and up category, they hail from places like Road Town, Tortola, BVI, or Aspen, CO (I know, but you can put anything you want as your hailing port in the USA). There was only one other sailboat, and it's in a slip, maybe awaiting work. The yard seems very professional, quiet and busy at the same time. most boats are up on the hard, and strapped down like aircraft to strong points in the concrete. Not a lot of other cruisers here now, we have seen no one from off another boat, although there are other boats along the wall.

This morning the water was like glass, and we are heading out to cross Lake Okeechobee. More later.
River Forest Marina just after sunrise
River Forest Marina just after sunrise
Comments
Vessel Name: Parallax
Vessel Make/Model: 37' Prout Snowgoose (1982)
Hailing Port: Pensacola
Crew: Derek, Heather and Grant
About:
Two astronomers, looking for variable stars and adventure. After cruising the Caribbean aboard S/V Paradox for 18 months in the early 90s, the crew swallowed the anchor and had a child, always planning their next Great Adventure: cruising under sail with Grant, showing him the world. [...]
Extra:
We knew that if we ever got a catamaran, we'd want a name to celebrate her twin-hulledness. Parallax is seeing the same thing from two slightly different points of view, which with our two eyes is what gives humans our depth perception. It's also a good metaphor for one of the benefits of marriage. [...]

S/V Parallax

Who: Derek, Heather and Grant
Port: Pensacola