Ready To Go; Almost
After several months of painting and other maintence. Then more than a month of provisioning, Shibumi is ready to sail. Our destination is Georgetown in the Bahamas. It is a trip that should take a couple of months with stops along the Florida Coast and island-hopping in the Bahamas.

The only problem... the tide is out and Shibumi is on the bottom. We have to wait at our dock until 2 o'clock in the afternoon for enough water to depart. At that time of day there will be only three hours of daylight to find a good place to anchor.

A Berth For the Night
There is new marina, Admiral's Cove, just a litte south of us on the Intra-Coastal Waterway (ICW). Admiral's Cove is still under construction, but I suspect that there is enough water there to spend the night and get a good early start tomorrow morning. But we have to be sure. The marina is not open so there are no charted depth. So we took the jeep over the bridge to check the depth using a hand-held depth sounder.

We Are Traveling With Another Boat
Don and Mary Carlisle sailed down from Jacksonville and are anchored in our canal. Because of the low tide "Dark & Stormy", their Rhodes designed sloop is also on the bottom.

We used Don's hand-held depth-sounder to determine that there is over 8 feet of water... so the plan is to wait until high tide this afternoon and move both boats to Admiral's Cove. Tomorrow morning we plan to leave Admiral's Cove early and sail to New Smyrna Beach. We could not find a security guard to discuss our plan with, so we will just do it.