Captain's Log: Across the Dog Leg

Photo Credit: S/V Lie-Lo

As I begin typing, we are underway southbound on Florida’s west coast Intracoastal Waterway, headed toward Treasure Island. We’ve been most of a week getting here. It only feels like a month.

Saturday, January 3, we remained in Bayou Cinco in Fort Walton Beach. Went ashore in L’il Stinker and dined on gumbo and jambalaya at Soul Cafe & Lounge, a Creole/Soul Food joint where we were waited on by the recently jilted-if-loquacious bartender, Anita who was certainly entertaining, but she did somehow misread our astonished looks as enrapturement. Truly we were overwhelmed by her persistence, using us as an audience for her endless stories about her ex, winning a recent bartending award, and how her most recent calling is that of dessert queen. Alas, we had other plans for our sweet tooth and never got to find out if her confections were “all that.” During our dinner, the sky did open up for a big, short shower that was blessedly finished with a vibrant rainbow outside the window about the time the check came. Taking this as our cue, we made a hasty exit.

We then walked to Beignets & Brew for an appropriate New Orleansian dessert. I’m surprised those two joints don’t collaborate somehow. They served it with a “butter cream” dipping sauce which was somehow simultaneously delicious, unnecessary, and spot on. With our clothing completely covered in powdered sugar, we stepped into the vibrant sunshine again to make our way back to the dinghy to bail and return to Stinkpot well before dark. I decked the tender with intentions of making an early escape toward Panama City in the morning. We settled in.

Sunday morning I rose with the dawn and put the coffee on. Hot cups in hand, we weighed anchor and began a long day’s cruise that finished in a lovely anchorage west of Panama City. We dined aboard inauspiciously on salad and grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches as the sun set and the recently-full moon rose photogenically on opposite sides of the creek.
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Another morning, another hot cup of coffee, another ritual weighing of the anchor—Monday started off foggy and had us proceeding into Panama City with our automated fog signal blaring. Soon the fog gave way to a beautiful sunny morning and saw us making good progress toward the Apalachicola/Carrabelle area from where “the crossing” is begun for most southing recreational vessels like ours. Opting to stop before the sun dipped below the trees, we anchored for the night just beyond White City—not far from Port St. Joe--in a small oxbow where we dined well on roast chicken breast (bone in) with a kale/potato hash.

Tuesday had us up with the dawn, and we dawdled a bit, but only barely. Before long, we were underway toward Apalachicola, which we passed through around 9AM as we pressed on to Carrabelle, which also wasn’t our final destination for the day. After transiting from Apalachicola to Carrabelle, we docked at the Moorings’ fuel dock for 160 gallons of fuel, freshwater top off (we had a ¼ tank left), and a poo pump out. They had some air leaks in the pump out hose, so it took a while for that final situation to be solved. Once Stinkpot’s needs were met, we pointed her back down the river and anchored by Dog Island in preparation for our “crossing” of the Gulf from there to Clearwater or so. In the slow-cooker bubbled two more chicken breasts for most of the day. Once anchored, I served them over rice with sautéed julienned cabbage. While transiting Apalachicola, we crossed into the Eastern Timezone, so our schedules were a bit skewed, but we still managed to drift off on the early side, awaking around 7AM. Awake and sipping coffee we got underway around 9AM bound for Clearwater.

This was a long-damned boat ride—a voyage by any other name—a full 24 hours underway from end to end. The boat behaved admirably well and the daytime portion of the trip was glorious with sun beaming into the boat and dolphins surfing in our bow wave. Then the sun went down, and we had to run in the darkness. We turned off every small light in the boat just to help preserve our night vision. It was darker than the inside of a dog (not sure how that became a measurement of missing lumens), and when the moon finally came up, the fog rolled in, and we couldn’t see for different reasons. We spent a dozen hours peering into the darkness to see something we desperately hoped would never be there—flotsam, a floating wreck, a half-sunk shipping container. Fortunately, we encountered none, and by 9:13AM we had dropped anchor in Belleair, just north of the causeway, still in a pea soup fog. We put to work settling in, but exhaustion quickly gave way to a morning nap that lasted until after noon.

Lazily rising to a sunny day without a trace of fog, it finally dawned on me that we made it! We were no longer within easy reach of winter’s icy fingers. It was 85°F inside the boat due to solar gain and it was a gorgeous 76°F outside. I mixed myself an instant iced coffee because brewing hot coffee seemed off the table and began trying to figure out our immediate future.

With a need to attend both the St. Pete Boat Show and the Seattle Boat Show later in the month, it made no sense to do anything except get a slip for a month. I began calling around to the marinas around Tampa Bay, but it quickly became apparent that most of the local marinas were not allowing stays longer than a week during this, the “high” season. Our friends, Sean and Louise on MY Vector were docked for a month at Fusion Resort, a marina on Treasure Island, and Sean had already kindly provided the details. I called Gee, the dockmaster, and pinned down a month starting Saturday, January 10. We had our backlog of Amazon purchases directed to the unsuspecting marina’s office—to include some hardware for upcoming boat upgrades.

We dined aboard—neither of us had the energy to even consider lowering L’il Stinker for trip ashore. I made a barbecue chicken and kielbasa pizza that was delicious. We bedded down on the later side with our body clocks still ticking down Central Time.

With the morning, we weighed anchor to move within striking distance of Fusion—the little jaunt we were on as this missive began—to allow the festivities with Sean and Louise to commence. We moved onto the dock the following Sunday. Our likeminded quartet had not been together since they visited us in Hopewell, VA last spring—before we sold the old Stinkpot and moved aboard the current one in Michigan. A lot of water has trickled over the dam since then, so we much fun was had catching up with them while we could.