Leg 5: Cayo Costa, FL to Dry Tortugas, FL
We left Cabbage Key around 11:30am on December 15th for our predicted 24 hour down wind sail. Two hours in, the winds were a pinch lighter than predicted, so we thought let’s dig out our spinnaker, God Bless. As soon as God Bless was rigged up, the wind completely died. I’m talking 0.1 knot of wind. I think I sneeze more powerfully than that. So we motored for a bit until the winds picked up again. The seas were calm until around 9:30pm. I was down below trying to sleep before my watch at 12am and couldn’t pack enough pillows around me to keep from rolling back and forth.
We had some good size swells rolling into our port side and the winds began to pick up. I poke my head out of the companionway mad as a hornet, wondering why we haven’t brought in the sails. Blake was sitting on the port side listening to a podcast. We rolled in some of the headsail but it didn’t help. The motion continued to intensify as the night went on. Our rail on the starboard side was dipping into the water every 90 - 180 seconds then popping back up. Sleep was not happening, no matter how bad we wanted it. It’s unnerving when you can’t find stability, especially after several hours, to the point of agitation.
The morning came and the motion continued, yet now we added crab traps to the mix. It was like a minefield of crab traps. While that sounds worse, it gave our minds something to focus on amidst the perpetual jolting motion back and forth. Then there it was, “Land ho!” Fort Jefferson was in our sight which meant a nap was in our near future.
As we entered the channel around 10:15am, on the lee side of the island, we were anticipating a sense of relief but instead our arrival aligned with arrival of not only the giant tourist ferry, Yankee Freedom, from Key West that was blasting into port but sea planes that were taking off and landing. While we may have been free of crab traps and the relentless motion of the sea, we weren’t home free yet. We needed to navigate a ferry, multiple planes, and find a place to drop our anchor.
After a few passes in and around the anchorage, we finally dropped the hook around 11:30am, in the Dry Tortugas Harbor anchorage, off the coast of Garden Key, directly in front of Fort Jefferson.
