…to a sleepover in Mile Hammock bay

Distance traveled: 37 nautical miles
Travel time: 5 hours, 47 minutes

We battled some heavy winds to leave the dock in the morning.  We get out to the ICW and look who we see! Privateer decided to join us for the trip.  They were traveling on south while the other 3 of us (C’est La Vie, Waterford and Sabrina) were headed to Mile Hammock Bay to anchor overnight. Way to Go was on a delivery so they got up early and left before the rest of us were up.  They probably travel sunup to sundown to get south as quickly as possible.

It was nice to travel with a flotilla.  We all set one of our VHF radios to channel 17 so we could chat throughout the day to keep each other informed of bridge openings, fast boats approaching, etc.

As we went down the ICW near Taylor’s Bay we dolphins in the area.  As the previous owner of Sabrina (Keri on Dream Girl) told me to look at the bow.  The dolphins like to get pushed through the water as the boat pushes forward.  She was right! I couldn’t quite make it out at first and then it surfaced.  Yay!  My day was complete!

When Waterford, C’est La Vie and Sabrina pulled off the ICW and into Mile Hammock Bay for the evening Privateer kept going south to another anchorage.

We are still buddy boating with C’est La Vie so we rafted up with them instead of anchoring ourselves.  Rafting up isn’t quite a sleepover, but I took a bit of artistic license. It is Sabrina’s first time to raft up with another trawler. When you raft up, one of the boats (usually the larger one) sets it’s anchor and the other boat pulls up next to it and ties up tight fore and aft (front and back) with lots of fenders in between.  We tried to get them to just tow us down the ICW tied up like that.  Sort of like a motorcycle with a sidecar.  That’s what it looked like with our 36er tied up to their 58er.  And if they got tired of us they could just swing close to a red day marker and scrape us off. 🙂

We carried some chicken sausage, snacks and our drinks over to join their salmon and veggies.  Kenny and Neal grilled it all up on the gas grill on the upper deck of C’est La Vie.  A lovely night.  An early night as we were leaving at 6:30 am.  Waterford dropped their own anchor and chose not to drop their dinghy and join us.

Kitty