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Friday, January 21, 2006 –

The long-awaited day finally arrived. After an exhausting morning of last-minute provisioning, making final decisions about what to bring and what to leave, and stowing as much as we could until we ran out of places to stow, we motored out of Riverside Marina under a cloudless, tropical sky. We’d planned on leaving at least two weeks earlier but that didn’t happen. Projects take longer than anticipated, problems inevitably arise, and our bodies run out of steam faster than they used to. Our first stop was only a mile away for fuel and water. Tom poured an additive in the tank to kill any algae that might be growing in the old fuel and I plunked a nozzle down the opening to begin pumping diesel, only to see the pink stuff start to spit out the overflow vents that were plugged. Tom took immediate action and punched out the clogged, corroded screens. That solved that little problem.
Day one breezed along without a hitch until we were coming up on marker 240. Tom was at the helm and said, "You better go down and turn on the running lights." Clouds had covered the last remnants of the late afternoon sun so I climbed down the ladder, flipped the switch, and then came back to take over the wheel. Tom went below to make sure the lights were working, saying he’d be right back. He never told me about a problem with the stern light. Ten minutes passed and he didn't come back. Something must've gone wrong. Did he lose his balance and fall overboard or was he lying unconscious on the galley floor after banging his head on who-knows-what? I waited as long as I could and then decided to use our signal. When either of us is below and we hear the sound of the engine suddenly throttle back, it means, "come up to the bridge right away." I throttled back but he didn’t show. I tapped my foot on the coach roof and watched for his head to pop up at the top of the ladder but that didn’t happen. I tapped again and this time he stuck his head up. "What?" he said. Then he told me about the problem with the stern light and he'd been fixing it. All that time I’d been following the channel, keeping red markers to starboard and green to port, but not paying any attention to the numbers - I was too busy thinking about that unconscious body below me. Tom picked up his binoculars and aimed them at the next channel marker. "Why are we at 3A?" he said. I didn't have a good answer. When we came to 4 and then 5, clearly something was wrong. What I should have done was work my way into Manatee Pocket right after I took over the wheel but instead I kept going in the ICW, right into a new numbering system. It was getting late but fortunately there was enough light to turn back and find the anchorage.