St. Lucie Lock

(and RV park...)

Happy Leap Year! Day! Whatever!

The weather apps all said the wind was going to come up in the late morning, and come from the north-ish. When crossing Lake Okeechobee, that's not great. The fetch of the wind can grow some pretty uncomfortable waves, and due to the lakes depth (almost none, that is), you can't bob and weave your way through it. If the ride is rough, you have to deal. So to avoid any issue we left at the crack of dawn, before any of it was supposed to happen.

Perfect sunrise

It's about a 2 hour ride across the lake. The winds were supposed to get strong around 10 am. We left before 7 am. The first hour was absolutely placid. Sunny skies, calm wind. The winds picked up around then, making small white caps on the water, maybe 1 foot seas. That steadily grew; winds blowing harder, waves getting bigger, and a bank of clouds took away the sun. It wasn't awful (like the gulf) but the last half hour was 2 footers on the beam. So we rocked. A lot.

We sped up the last 20 minutes, hoping to make the ride smoother. Since it was on our side, and at a tight frequency, we rocked from side to side. I counted out the minutes until we could turn and head toward the lock, taking the waves on our stern when we did.

Not an ideal crossing.

Once we turned the ride smoothed out greatly. But the swells were still substantial. We had to approach the lock at idle speed, which was challenging since we sloshed left and right. The water didn't smooth out until the other side of the lock. We got through unscathed, but it was a little tense.

On the canal everything was placid. The skies cleared and the winds died down a bit. Even docking at the lock's little marina was pretty easy.

When Russ went to plug us in he was greeted by a local.
See the tiny frog left of the plug?

Still have some electrical issues. Since we got in early Russ was able to fiddle with the batteries and the "path maker" that's supposed to monitor them -- but as far as we can tell it only drains the port battery (which read 11.9 V all day) and uber-charge the starboard battery (which read 14.9 V all day). We'll see how things go tomorrow, but I'm very glad we didn't just up and go to the keys -- we may have been stuck there a long time.

(Below: how to go sledding, Florida style).