Blow Me Away

12.1.10

So we decided to spend yesterday in Sarasota to get some things done around town and on the boat since the wind was in a SE direction (directly where we wanted to go!) We had planned on leaving this morning and sailing down to Gasparilla since winds were predicted to be 15-20 in our favor.
Well, as always with sailing, something went wrong. We were woken up at 3:30am by howling winds and a very rocky boat. We both jumped up and looked outside right as the winds switched direction. We were shoved from a NE to a SW direction in a matter of seconds. Things were falling all over the place in the boat and the pets were both thrown off their feet. The winds, as it turned out, had piped up to 35knots and were coming in from the only direction where we were unprotected - fabulous.
We quickly grabbed everything off the deck that could possibly blow away and shoved it down below and closed up all the hatches just as the pounding rain started. The worse thing about this whole situation was that we weren't sure our anchor would hold in such strong winds. Although we have had great luck with our Bruce Anchor, we have been told in high winds it is unreliable. Well, we were about to test that theory! The worst part about the rain was that we couldn't see outside to tell whether we were dragging anchor or not.
So with visibility down to nil and not much else that we could do at this point, we crawled back into bed with the GPS in hand and tracked our movements on there, making sure we weren't moving from our anchor spot.
As morning broke, the winds had yet to die down but the rain had stopped. We were able to see that we had not drug anchor and everything was safely as we had left it. We looked out and saw that other boats were rocking and bumping around just as much as us and that everyone was holed up on their boats - no one was going anywhere in this mess.
So, we hunkered down for the day, reading, watching movies - always with the GPS nearby - and waited out the wind. 15 hours later, the wind finally lulled to a relaxing 25knots. (haha - still very rocky!)
We put everything back in its place and got everything ready to set sail bright and early the next morning, only a day behind our predicted schedule.