TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Well, on Wednesday we were planning to start going up the ICW, with winds again forecast at 0-5 knots, but as we went past the St. Mary’s canal, there was a good wind of about 10 knots blowing NE, so I made a snap decision to take the ocean route to make up time. Turned out this was a bad choice. The wind was right on our nose, so we had to tack back and forth, and after about 8 hours we were only about 15 miles from the Canal. We listened to teh weather forecast, adn they were forecasting no change in wind direction, with more thunderstorms during the night, with gusts up to 40 knots. At this point we were already sailing into 5ft swells, very unpleasant, and I didn’t want to subject the crew to this kind of weather all night, so I decided to turn around and head back to our port of departure. We only took about 3 hours, running with the wind, to get back to the same Marina, and spent another night there. We had dinner at the only restaurant still open after 9pm (we had to tidy up & have a few beers to unwind first!). So we pretty much sailed 12 hours and made no progress today – very frustrating, so let’s just call it a training exercise for our crew.