ICW Mile 895: Cape Canaveral, Florida
Another Atlantic Sunset
Wednesday morning we said goodbye to St. Augustine and after a 30-hour offshore passage arrived and docked at Cape Canaveral. St. Augustine was a quaint little town with a surprising number of tourists, but we were happy to get moving south spurred on by the passage of a cold front that reminded us we were not far enough south yet.
We made another long overnight passage mainly because there are no intermediate stops that are reasonable to do in a short winter day. We needed to pace our arrival at Cape Canaveral to about noon, we thought, and because we started early the day before, at 9:30 a.m., we needed to slow down over the night. No problem, it was very calm and warm. And eventful in very cool ways.
The first event happened at 6:53 p.m.: A rocket carrying a communication satellite launched from Cape Canaveral. We knew it was scheduled that night and were waiting for it. They launched at the earliest time in their 5o-minute window. We were 50 miles northeast on the half-moon lit ocean and could hear the low rumbling before a great flame lit up the horizon. It lifted slowly, passing behind the low clouds, I caught a video of it rising here. The video doesn’t look so dramatic, but when you’re out on the ocean surrounded by darkness, a rocket launch is impressive. We could see the first stage separate and fall away from the yellow flame as a dim red ember. It arced east for about 5 minutes before we lost sight of it.
Later that night, Shelly was visited and escorted by a pack of dolphins for about 45 minutes. The first one breached and exhaled, startling Shelly as she listened to her music. She said they were quite large too. Then a fish jumped up onto the deck. Shelly picked could hear flapping around and spotlighted it to see what was going on. She threw it back into the water (probably into the mouth of one of those dolphins). I of course missed all of this while taking one of my naps below deck. Shelly didn’t wake me. As a rule, you want to allow the other to sleep as long as possible during their breaks on these passages. We’ve been trying 3 hrs on/off, but really neither of us has been able to sleep more than a couple hours at a time anyway.
Today and through the weekend the weather is supposed to be windy and fairly cold – for Florida, but it’s still over 60F so not that cold. Our wind instrument shows it gusting to 17 knots and feels it’s howling as we sit in the dock. Same windspeed when we’re sailing doesn’t seem so high.
We are here until at least Sunday night or whenever we get another weather window to do the long passage down to Vero Beach, our Christmas destination.
And Another Sunrise
Posted in Sailing by Mark with comments disabled.