Weekend Trip to McRee
April 25-26, 2009…
We headed out Saturday morning around 8am and had a nice sail around Pensacola Bay.
We had a dolphin come say “hi” at one point.
After sailing all morning, we ended up anchoring at Ft. McRee. We grilled hot dogs for lunch and enjoyed cocktails. For dinner we grilled Fillet Mignon and had shrimp along with some fruity drinks.
Pogo enjoyed the view.
Saturday was a very enjoyable day. Ft. McRee was loaded with boats. At one point a sailboat on the hook swung and was too close to the rode of a power boat, so it snagged the sailboat rudder and took them some time to get it free, but there appeared to be no damage. Surprisingly, with all of the boats out there, the noise dropped to nothing around midnight, so we were able to have a pretty decent night sleep.
Sunday was a different story. We woke up around 5am to the wind already howling and by 6am it was up considerably more. We fixed coffee and ate breakfast, then checked the weather reports. Weather reports were indicating clear skies and 3-4 knot winds, which it clearly wasn’t. About 7:30am we pulled up the hook to head back. My wind gauge indicated it was already 20 knot wind and gusting to 25 knots. The weather reports still indicated about 4 knot wind. The sky was very cloudy as well. The seas averaged 3-4 foot swells with peak swells at 6 foot in the Pensacola Pass; it was average of 2 foot swells in the main bay with peaks to 4 feet. We took a lot of water over the bow from the rise and fall over the waves, which made for a rough ride back. During the course of our return trip, the wind ramped up to 25 knots with max gusts of 35 knots. This was data provided by my wind meter and by the amount of spray I was hit with, I believe the wind gauge I have aboard was accurate. The final weather report for Sunday was 22 knot wind, gusting to 25 knots, and 6 foot seas as reported by WeatherUnderground.com and WEAR3 TV, so I must have hit a couple of sweet spots to get the higher readings.
Here’s a shot as the waves were picking up.
Here’s a video before it became too rough to continue videoing due to the sea spray. Funny how photos and video never seem to quite depict how rough conditions are after the fact.
At one point during our return, our GPS lost the satellites, which it has never done before. It was out a good portion of our return trip, but we knew where we were and where we were going, so it wasn’t a big deal, but still concerning. Our SPOT track also relies on GPS satellites and we clearly lost comms with SPOT as well at one point, because of the huge gap in recorded spottings.
Here was our track.
