12/2-12/4 Carrabelle continues

As we suspected, we are still in Carrabelle and will be for the foreseeable future.  We’ve consulted all soothsayers we can find and none of them see a window opening any time soon.  Who are our soothsayers?  I’ve taken some screen shots from a few of the websites that we look at.  The first one I’m going to show you is Eddie’s Weather Wag.  He doesn’t have a website, but he posts daily on the American Great Loop Cruising Assoc. forum.  His posts are strictly information for cruisers who are wanting to make the jump across the bend as we are.  This is what he posted yesterday. He seems to be snickering at those of us hoping for a crossing this week.  Hmmmm.

Another of the sites we use is Marv’s Weather Service.  He uses bouy reports and makes predictions based on those.  Here’s his prediction.

NOAA also has a lot of helpful information.

Windty is another go to site.  I have to remember when I look at wave height on Windty that the unit of measure is meters and not feet.  I got really excited one day seeing a bunch of numbers in the 1s until Tim pointed out that little detail.  Ah well.

Don’t get me wrong, staying in Carrabelle is not a hardship, everyone has been super friendly and very helpful.  For Tim and I though it has also been a bit … confusing.  See we keep thinking of things we need/want and ordering them.  Our confusion is -Where do we have stuff shipped to?  Ideally we would not be here long and so we should ship stuff ahead of us.  If we are going to be here for a while then we should have the stuff sent here.  We’ve leaned on the side of optimism and figured a window is surely going to come and we’ll be untying lines and heading south any day now.  So we’ve had several packages sent to Dorothy’s Aunt Barbara in St. Pete.  As you can tell, that optimism  has been unfounded.  We’re still here and our stuff is in St. Pete.  What to do, what to do????  The decision was made that a road trip was in order.  We’d just drive to St. Pete and pick up some of the stuff.  Then we could use the stuff to fix the electronics, bow thruster, dingy winch, etc.   So, Saturday the three of us, Maggie came too, loaded up at 6am for  the drive to St. Pete.  We enjoyed lunch with Barbara before picking up 2 boxes and heading back to Carrabelle.  Tim knew one of the boxes would be his new/used Raymarine chart plotter.  It was.  He hoped the other was the relay switch for the dingy winch.  It was not.  Instead we got the bow thruster propeller.  Not a bad thing, just not what we hoped.  We really wanted the relay switch so we could feel better about raising and lowering the dingy without glitches.  We’ll figure that out.