Brain dead

Prepping for launch day… Amazon Prime-early results

Brain dead

Sunrise over St. Augustine lighthouse

by Christine Kling

I would like to write something really clever tonight for this blog. But the fact is, after 10 hours of driving a sailboat like a motorboat, of getting up before dawn and then scanning the water ahead and the depth sounder and the iPad chart plotter, I am done in – spent – brain dead.

Neither the charts or the Magenta Line are always accurate

There's lots that I have enjoyed about the waterway, but now I am getting to the point where I just want to get home. I've seen too much shallow water, found the deep water wasn't where the chart said it was (I was not aground in this screen shot), seen too many tide rips that almost prevented me from getting through a bridge or two, spent too many days bucking these south winds that have blown all the month of January, and spent too many nights in a current-plagued anchorage getting up all night to see where the boat has swung and to check the depth sounder.

Pelican dreaming on a marker - like me

My shoulders ache from hours at the helm because my autopilot can't keep me in the channel, and I find myself sleeping poorly as I dream of red and green markers all night. I'm tired. And tonight , I am in New Smyrna Beach at mile marker 845, and the turn up my river towards home will not come until mile marker 1065.

Tomorrow, I am going to have to make a choice. I am considering heading out the inlet at Cape Canaveral and making a passage offshore to just get home. A front is coming through and tomorrow is going to be a crummy day with rain and wind gusting to 30. Today, I had 20 knots against current on the Halifax River. Not fun. But behind the front, the winds are supposed to clock around to the north, and depending on what forecast I look at, they may not be too strong. I could do one overnight passage and get home.

The question is am I up to it? Is the boat? Is Chip? I'm so brain dead, I'm not even sure I can make a good decision.

If I do decide to head offshore, I will anchor somewhere close to Canaveral tomorrow night and then head outside on Saturday. You won't have to wait until next Friday to learn what I did, though. You can follow me on my SPOT transponder by checking me out at this website: http://tinyurl.com/talespinner.

This afternoon, I got an email from a dear friend who follows my travels on my spot page. She sent this screen shot in an email with the message: "Look at what you were approaching at around 2:30pm this afternoon." (Hint: you won't get it if you haven't read any of my first four books) It's pretty funny when my followers know more about what I'm doing and where I am than I do. I guess that's what happens when you're brain dead.