Passage's Progress: No more ICW!

We still have a mainsail, and it still works!! Today was the first time the mainsail cover has been off since Norfolk, VA. Between having a nice wind and weather forecast, and not wanting to wait for 20 bridges to open for us today, we decided to go "offshore" between Palm Beach and Ft Lauderdale. The wind was forecast to blow from 15 to 20 knots, pretty much behind. As we started sailing our GPS ETA was around 2:00. A couple of hours later I noticed our ETA was around 5:30, even though we had pretty much the same boat speed. It took a few minutes to figure out that we had sailed too far offshore and were sailing against the Gulf Stream. "Too far" in this case was about a mile and a half! We turned back towards shore and when we were about a half mile off the beach our ground speed once again improved. There were several other boats going outside, one motoring without an ounce of sail out. Tomorrow on our way to Miami we have to go outside again - there is a fixed bridge that has only 56 feet of clearance. Every other bridge on the ICW has a 65 foot clearance - we're not sure what they were thinking. Maybe the engineer was dyslexic and got the 6 and the 5 reversed.

A fellow sailor today

We saw three schools of flying fish - good thing the cats weren't on deck then. Almost as soon as we started sailing Zimmie was seasick. And since the diesel wasn't running Fluff came out in the cockpit several times to keep us company. We have a sailing cat and a motoring cat.