We had initially planned to move Kitty Hawk from Melbourne, Florida to Oriental, NC beginning May 12th in an effort to avoid Memorial Day Weekend traffic. Unfortunately, my associate who had planned to help, received a jury duty summons the week prior which necessitated his appearance on May 18th. So, as sailors do, we altered our plan….(my friend, who has helped me move Kitty Hawk a few times, always says “sailors plans are written in the sand at low tide” it may not be an original quote…..but it seems to be fitting). We delayed our departure to May 19th which put us traveling in the midst of the Memorial Day Weekend mess. We decided to stay in St. Augustine at the end of day #3 for the entire weekend to avoid the power boat / maniac jet ski rider traffic debacle.
Our first day was pleasant enough….a short river cruise from Melbourne, Florida to Just North of Titusville with only two bascule bridges to contend with during the transit….the first bridge was the Addison Point Bridge (Formerly the NASA Causeway Bridge)……this is a twin bascule which means that the individual sides of the road operate independently. It gave us a little worry when we found out that the southeast section wasn’t operational but we easily slipped through the half that was working properly.
We were fortunate enough to also see a launch from Cape Canaveral of an Atlas Rocket carrying what may be the next generation of “space shuttle”…
(A Bascule is a type of bridge that opens, usually like a draw bridge….they can be what is described as a two or one “leaf” meaning that either each side opens equally in two parts or one large span tilts upward to open the bridge. They can also be “twin” where the opposing lanes open separately.)
We anchored in a spot known as “Mosquito Lagoon” a nice, deep (8′), wide open area with no other boats. Ironically, we didn’t see any Mosquitos. We did however see this…..
We were anchored…just north of the marker for haulover canal bridge near where the chart mark for the “ditch” is on the photo of the chart…….we had just gone for a swim to check the anchor which was beautifully and deeply set into the hard mud and crushed shells of the lagoon floor….I felt pretty confident we were in for a good night’s sleep. We returned to the cockpit, I checked the weather report and turned the VHF radio on. We immediately heard a weather alert and discovered that an unforecasted pop up thunderstorm with gusts up to 60mph was headed directly for the area in which we had just anchored. The breezes that bracket the Florida peninsula had apparently been battling all day, West of us in central Florida, pushing east and west for supremacy over the weather pattern. In this instance, the East pushing winds won and drove the ensuing storm right at us.
We scrambled to secure everything we could, placed our backup electronics in the stove in an attempt to isolate them from any possible lightning strikes. I have read some articles that say a microwave works better since it is designed to keep radiation in and therefore out as well, but we don’t currently have a microwave on board so we went with what we had. We also started the engine and had it in neutral in case we needed to ease the load on the anchor with a little forward thrust. As it turned out, we didn’t need that since the anchor was so well set.
The good news was the wind had died down to about 30mph gusts….the rain was very heavy and all we could see was the amazing number of lightning strikes all around the boat. The weather service report later said that there was an averge of 170 strikes every 10 minutes associated with that cell……it was a stressful 45 minutes until it passed. Kitty Hawk did very, very well. The anchor held perfectly despite several 180 degree turns as the storm passed over us and the wind shifted accordingly.
We got a good night’s sleep after all….
