Saturday and Sunday, January 8th and 9th
We were both awake by 5:30 am (no surprise there, having fallen asleep so early), so we’d showered, breakfasted, and Mike had completed his engine checks by the time it was getting light. We pushed off the dock at 7 am and headed back out into the channel. Behind us there was a parade of bass boats – I believe there was a fishing tournament that was about to get started. Pretty morning:
And here we are, underway:
And looking forward along the glassy waterway:
We blasted right along at almost 14 knots, and kept surprising ourselves at how much ground we were covering. We’re so used to 8 knots in a boat that 14 knots is rather startling.
We made it to the Moore Haven Lock by 8:15 am and locked right through with one other boat, then on to the Ortona Lock, which we made by 10 am. We only waited a few minutes for it, then locked through by ourselves. At that point we had 28 miles to go to reach our last and final lock, the Franklin Lock, which only opened on the odd hours. We clearly weren’t making the 11 am lockage, so we played with our speed so that we arrived just a few minutes early for the 1 pm lockage. There were four boats that were allowed to lock eastbound before we and five other boats were called in to the lock for the westbound lockage. We cleared the Franklin Lock just before 2 pm, and decided that rather than running fast and making it all the way home, we’d keep it slow at 8 knots and plan to stop at our yacht club in downtown Fort Myers (about 11 miles shy of our house). We hadn’t planned on being home before Sunday, so we figured that we’d enjoy the new boat.
We stopped at the Fort Myers City Yacht Basin (about a mile shy of our yacht club) for fuel and a pump-out. We were incredibly impressed with the boat’s fuel burn: we’d traveled 107 nautical miles (123 statute miles) and burned just 38 gallons of fuel, and most of the time we’d run at 13.5 knots. That’s an incredible 2.8 nautical miles per gallon (or 3.2 statute miles per gallon). The boat performed exactly as we’d been hoping – and we were pleased. For comparison’s sake, we cruised the last Golden, our trawler, at 8 knots and consumed 1.7 gallons per mile and that was considered fuel efficient. That's a big difference.
At 4:30 pm we pulled into the Royal Palm Yacht Club – here we are on the docks:
We were happy to reach the west coast, and just ecstatic about the boat. It ran without a hitch since our departure in Stuart and we couldn’t be happier. It truly is everything we hoped it would be, and are looking forward to many good years cruising.
That night we had a light dinner in the RPYC lounge, and once again went to sleep early.
Sunday morning there was no rush to get going - only 11 miles left to go. It was cool and somewhat breezy still, and we opted to sit on the flybridge for our slow cruise down the Caloosahatchee River to our home dock. We arrived at 10:30 am - tying Golden up to her new home.
New Adventures Await!!
