With a nice weather window to sail down the coast, we left the marina in St. Augustine just before 9:30am in order to catch the bridge opening at 9:30. We left in a bit of a rush, but made it through the bridge and then motored onward out the inlet. Winds were looking nice and we initially put up full sails, but quickly reefed down the mainsail as we were a bit over powered with full sails.

We sailed along, adjusting sails up and down a few times as the wind changed slightly during the day. Nice consistent winds overnight as well, and we continued on through the night going along great.

The wind got a little lighter the next morning, and so we rigged up the spinnaker and flew that for most of the morning until the winds started to pick up, exactly as predicted. These winds kept building, and eventually we ran on just the mainsail for a while heading as close downwind as we could point heading towards the inlet at Fort Pierce.

One mistake we did make here, is we didn't check the current at the inlet. We assumed it went with the tide, which does seem to be true (or true enough we never noticed) at most inlets, but here the tide is phased 90 degrees with the current in the inlet. I guess this makes sense depending on the topology of the area, but this did mean that although we arrived at slack low tide, the current was running nearly three knots out the inlet still. So this meant some pretty slow going motoring at 6 knots and only going 3 knots over ground.

It was also a pretty ugly entrance as the wind had been really picking up at this point and so there were a lot of waves right at the end of our sail. Putting away the main was a bumpy ride.

But after getting into the inlet the waves died off, and it was just slow going on our way it.

We dropped anchor at a field just inside the inlet. There are some better anchorages further in, but we were tired and it was getting late. The first place we dropped the anchor ended up being a bit too close to a nearby catamaran. Thankfully the owner came out and told us as much, so we moved a little further towards shore which ended up being a good call. I still don't have a good grasp on where boats are anchored when there is a lot of current and wind. Catamarans sit differently than monohulls, and depending on the current/wind different sized boats also seem to float a little different on their anchors. Anchoring in current is a skill we are certainly still working on.

Trip: 167NM, ~32 Hours.