As an old salt once said, “A sailors plans are drawn in low tide sands.”

Our plan, carved in stone, was to leave Stuart, FL bright and early on a Saturday morning. Check.

And sail overnight to get to St. Augustine. Nope.

Then make it all the way to Washington D.C. before hurricane season. LOL NO.

In hindsight our plans were ambitious – having sailed on the Atlantic Ocean once and only for a few hours, in broad daylight to boot. Even in mostly favorable circumstances, one of us (me) got seasick. Like puke a bunch in between laying down for naps kind of seasick.

The St. Lucie Inlet is known to be one of Florida’s most treacherous, so we gathered local knowledge, consulted sailing forums and found this very detailed PDF.

Prior to starting our long haul North we had navigated the St. Lucie for a day sail out on the Atlantic and Mark did great. He singlehanded the boat while I either threw up or tried not to throw up. Exciting, I know. That trip was fairly uneventful aside from when our chart plotter crapped out at sunset.

Not only were we going through the inlet as it was getting dark, but we also had to navigate back to the marina with nothing but lit channel markers to guide our way. Choice vocabulary was employed, but we made it to our mooring ball without grounding which felt like a massive accomplishment.

Thus, beginning the journey north, we had confidence navigating the inlet. Once again I found myself getting seasick, so Mark was left to do most of the heavy lifting. Regardless, the prospect of sailing and seeing new places kept us motivated despite the rocky conditions and lack of wind. After quite a few hours of getting tossed around and going nowhere we decided to turn on the motor.

The motor ran, but it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. At first I thought that we might be moving, but I couldn’t tell because there wasn’t any land to gauge our speed, but when we didn’t regain steering we knew that there was something wrong. Not that I was too keen on problem solving whilst clinging to the rail with my head hanging overboard having hurled for what felt like the hundredth time.

After some investigation (not on my part), Mark discovered that the propeller shaft was no longer connected to the engine. As it turns out the bolt that holds our propeller shaft in the coupling on the engine snapped in half and the propeller wasn’t turning. Mark tried to work on it without me to no avail.

Now remember, I was green –in both color and experience– and we were getting bounced around a little bit, but we had to fix it. So down below I went. Helping Mark in the hot engine compartment while inhaling diesel fumes. We managed to find a bolt that would work in the interim and got the prop shaft back into the coupling. In doing that we shifted the shaft packing and ended up with water pouring into the bilge, a lot faster than the drips that the shaft packing is supposed to allow. Try as we might, we could not realign the bolt, combined with the fact that we were totally becalmed and taking on water we called Boat US. Of course I was running outside to up-chuck every few minutes. For me, it was a rough day.

This was also the start of some dinghy drama. While we were out bouncing in the waves our inflatable dinghy got a hole in it. We covered the outboard with a really thick piece of yoga mat, but that slipped off and in all of the propeller drama we didn’t notice.

Since our last grounding adventure we are members of Boat US and within 40 minutes they came and got us while we were bobbing around 14 miles of the coast of Fort Pierce. They towed us to a slip at Harbortown where we could order parts and make repairs.

As for our plans, we now draw them in low tide sands. How could we not, after starting a 200 mile journey and only making it 20 miles thanks to Boat US.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, but being sea sick made me sleepy and completely unmotivated. Next time!