Westons Go South: Crossing to Marathon

Saturday and Sunday, April 23 and 24

Crossing to Marathon

We left first thing in the morning with intentions of spending the night at Little Shark River in the Everglades. As it turned out, however, our progress was slower than we anticipated so it would have been way after dark when we arrived there – NOT a good thing to do. Therefore, we decided to just go the whole way to Marathon in one jump.

The wind was fast and dead on our nose, with seas of three to four feet. As we headed into the open waters south of the Florida coast, however, the waves grew much higher, averaging four to six feet. Waves kept coming way up over the bow – every hatch and porthole began leaking. Every now and then a giant wave would come over and drench the helmsman.

It was cold, wet, and miserable. I got sick, of course. The night seemed to go on forever; I was really scared that we weren’t going to make it.

Someone else was scared too. A little bird landed on our boat in the afternoon, and he just decided to hang out with us. He even sat on Sam’s chest for a little while. After awhile he flew into the cabin, where he hopped around for a long time. I tried to feed him but he wasn’t interested. Finally, in the morning, I found him lying dead on the floor. It was so sad!

We did, finally, start getting close to Marathon. There were still hours of darkness left, so we had to slow way down in order to arrive in daylight. What a heartbreaker, to have to slow down when all you wanted to do was to GET OFF!

Finally dawn came and we headed in toward the shore. Suddenly alarms began going off – our engine had overheated! Sam raced to turn it off. We spent the next half hour troubleshooting – trying to figure out what had happened. We couldn’t figure it out, so when the engine was cooler we decided to start it up and see how it did. It wouldn’t start – something was wrong with the starter again!

Finally we ran out of options and decided to call Sea Tow to pull us in. We tried to get them on our VHF radio, but the connection was so bad neither of us could understand each other. They tried to call us on our cell phone, but we had no reception since we were too far out to sea. Finally we were able to understand each other well enough so they could get our location, and they came to get us. They towed us into Marathon Marina, which has a boatyard with a team of mechanics.

After we tied up I spent hours cleaning up the cabin. The whole boat was totally trashed from the trip. Safety gear and clothing was flung all over, food and books had been tossed around, there were puddles of salt water in several places, and everything was sticky with salt water. What a mess!

After that, about all we did was sleep since we were totally exhausted. It took several days to finally feel normal again!