Bringing LaLeLu Home to Merritt Island - Day 1

Let me start by saying, this trip made me realize that I do not have a career as a delivery skipper in my future. I have never been so cold and miserable in my life. It all started very well. We got to Halifax Marina early Friday afternoon. It was a nice, calm sunny day. We uneventfully unloaded 10+ totes full of boat stuff onto LaLeLu, and she swallowed it up and had room to spare. The prior owner, Les, came over and showed us how to work various things, and gave us some extra canvas, sails, etc. that went with the boat. He and his wife were staying over on their new boat in another slip in the marina and he planned to come over and help untie us at our scheduled 8a departure. We were up at 6:00 am Saturday and after listening to dire NOAA weather predictions, decided to leave a little earlier in an attempt to make the 50 kmile journey to Titusville Municipal Marina before the squalls hit. We headed out of Halifax at about 7:30 am and Les was on his dock waiving good bye to us. (Later that evening he told Chris it was very hard for him to watch his boat sail away). The first half of the day we had mild weather with winds dead on the nose about 15-20 knots. We motored all the way. We had one soft grounding (ok, it was really two groundings, but since it was in the same spot we only think of it as one) inside the main channel of the ICW @ red mm 34 just past the Coronado Beach draw bridge. We were on a falling tide and concerned about being stuck there for several hours while the tide came back in. In a bit of a panic, we hailed SeaTow, who quoted us $680 to pull us loose. That quote gave us the incentive we needed to wiggle her off. From there on out the water was very skinny. We hand steered almost all the way to masquito lagoon with depths hovering around 7' (we draw 5'). It was such a relief to get to the lagoon where the depth averaged about 9'. We got to Haulover canal at about 3:00 pm. As we went through the canal, we saw a wall of squalls coming at us. The wind had steadily increased throughout the day and by this time we had 25 knots steady. When the squall line hit us we got gusts up to 38 knots and blinding rain. LaLeLu took it in stride and brought us safely to the marina by about 5:00 pm. We plugged into the power and enjoyed a nice, toasty evening aboard playing Yatzee and watching TV.