I departed Port Lucaya on Grand Bahama Saturday morning to get back across the Gulf Stream before the nasty front that came thru Florida yesterday and today… beautiful sailing to start, carried a spinnaker in a moderate ENE until late afternoon, and close to the eastern side of the Stream. Breeze picked up out of the SE overnight, fast sailing, but with the leftover slop out of the NE from the previous day’s frontal passage, it made for quite a mess, and I was hand-steering for most of the night… Beautiful, however, with a bright moon, it was a wonderful night out there…

Crossed paths with the CARNIVAL SENSATION just before sunset, they were bound for Port Canaveral… Non-stop CG securite’ broadcasts yesterday morning regarding their arrival, establishing a 500 yard security zone about the ship off Canaveral, something weird was going on…. Saw on the TV news last night, some drunken passenger had made a bomb threat Saturday night, which delayed their arrival by several hours…

Sailed into Fort Pierce inlet Sunday at 0430, perfect end to the passage… gliding in on a strong flood, straight into the moonlight, 8+ knots over the bottom, one minute the usual noise of wind and waves and all the associated sounds of a boat rolling heavily, then absolute silence once inside the jetty, only the sound of the seas breaking on the rocks… Truly, one of the magic moments of this entire winter’s cruise, would have missed it completely had the engine been running. No sign of life anywhere on the deserted shore, but just as I approached the CG station, a dolphin did one of those playful belly-flops, 3 times in quick succession not more than a boatlength away, as if to remind me that at least someone else was awake at that hour… LOL!

Dropped the hook and grabbed about 90 minutes of sleep, before riding the tide up towards Vero… turned out to be a beautiful day of sailing, with the exception of motoring thru Vero, sailed all the way up to the Dragon anchorage past Melbourne…

Gave Pete Linwick of Florida Rigging a call to say Hi, turned out he was working the last day of the Palm Beach Boat Show… So I asked him if they were aware of the drama that was unfolding somewhere off Palm Beach, the VHF had been going nonstop for the past hour with news of a sailboat sinking somewhere out there, with 5 people in the water…

He hadn’t heard anything yet, but right away he suspected who it might be… A boat that Florida Rigging had done a lot of work on had skipped out of the boatyard in the middle of the night Saturday, with the yard bills unpaid… LOL!

Sure enough, they were one in the same… but the story gets even stranger, there is a LOT, it appears, that the authorities have yet to figure out about this one…

The boat had 2 jetskis aboard in lieu of a tender or liferaft, and that’s what the crew of 5 took to… but, I suppose they weren’t prepared for how rough the conditions were going to be that day, and at least some found themselves in the water, and nearing exhaustion… a Towboat US took them all aboard, while SeaTow attempted a salvage, but there was no chance of that… The Captain Ron went down in about 1,000 feet of water, 4 miles offshore, just outside of the 3 mile exclusion zone…. (grin)

CG was on the scene shortly afterwards, and forced all 5 at gunpoint to transfer to their vessel. The Towboat US guy apparently said he’d never seen so many guns in his life (grin)

The crew was not American, Pete thought they might have been from Eastern Europe, perhaps one of the former Soviet states… One possible explanation might be that they scuttled the boat, and were planning to use the jetskis to race to the beach, and do the “One Foot on the Beach” thing, that would give them the legal status to begin to effect a quest for US residency or citizenship… doesn’t explain why they would have gone thru all the trouble to have the boat work done, but who knows? There’s much more to come out of this incident, you can be sure…

Arrived up at the Dragon anchorage, just in time to turn on the TV and find out I was right in the crosshairs of a possible tornado headed towards Satellite Beach… LOL! Turned out not to be, but nonetheless last night featured some very wild weather, and the squally weather persisted until about noon today… Still, had some really nice sailing thru the rain this morning, then behind the front this afternoon, some pretty boisterous close-hauled sailing up the rest of the Indian River, and even all the way up Mosquito Lagoon. Not very often you can sail all the way through there, it was sweet, and there was virtually no one else out there…

Plan to leave Ponce Inlet in the morning, should be a nice sail in the westerly that’s forecast, but it sounds like the wind is really gonna shut off for the next week or so… looks like a lot of light air drifting, and probably a hefty dose of motoring/motorsailing in my future… (grin) Still, I can’t complain, so far the return trip has still been pretty awesome, and there are still plenty of bright moonlit nights to come…

Best regards,

Jon