[t951]

So, a few weeks ago I posted here looking for tips, or a route.

One of the best pieces of advice was get a captain, so we did.....sadly, it was not a local captain.

The journey started in St Pete at the Galati. The boat was supposed to be ready on Thursday or Friday the 1st or 2nd. It wasn't ready until Thursday the 8th. Both motors, transmissions, and generator. I also had the bottom freshly painted.

We leave on the 8th at 2p. We figure we will boat to either Hula bay marine or acrross the bay to St. Pete municipal marine.

At 230p, our captain introduces our keel to the bottom. We were in very shallow water and we were idling and just gently hit. We were about 10 feet from the edge of the channel marker. (Hindsight 20/20 we should have idled backed to the marina).

We get off the bottom slowly and make our way to the St Pete marina. The Hula bay one was near shallow water so we went to St Pete marina.

We get there at 615 and it is closed. The previous owner had left us the boat on empty so we needed to fill it up. This is the last marina before the gulf, so we park at the pump. We get a few visits and we are told we can chill there until the morning.

We have sandwiches and go to sleep. At 8a, a very pretty harbor master unlucks the pumps and we fill the aux tank and main tank on the left side. We start on the right side and my mom comes out of the middle room yelling at us to stop. We had diesel pouring in her room. The mattress and walls are covered in fuel. We call the boat shop and they repair it (split fuel line). We now know why they didn't fill it up.

We clean out our poop tank and fill our fresh water and set sail. The harbor guy, not the hot blonde, tell us we should easily make venice.

We head out into the channel and make good time....except we are burning a lot of fuel and it appears our trim tabs aren't letting us plane. Off to our right and behind us is a pitch black sky, ahead its sunny and clear. At our pace we are good.

Then, our sun pad blew off. We had to turn around to get it. We are now overtaken by the storm. 6-8 foot waves and we finally get it in the boat. (It is full of water and weighs a ton).
The winds are 50mph and our top is almost pulled off. The rain is insane, and we follow our plotter and head south based on our charts.

As we near Sarasota we decide, that because of the weather, it would make more sense to stop there before it got dark, since the storm and sun pad set us back so far.

I had been driving with the captain watching. I return the helm to him and go below to make reservations at the marina.

I am downstairs for 4 minutes and then.....bang...bang...bang....the moron had run us aground hard.

We are just outside big pass in Sarasota.

We call Sea-Tow (boat-us actually). They send someone out, but the waves are insane, and worse, we are in 1foot of water. They can't get to us. We will have to wait until the low-high tide at 12am. For the next 7 hours the swim platform is getting pounded. It starts to rip off the transom. The pounding was relentless. We were stuck in the spot that had 2 separate waves meet. They locked us in the spot. We were about 20 feet from the deep water. The tow guy was awesome, but couldn't pull us out. We had to toss him ropes because he couldn't get to us without bottoming. He told us to wait until high high tide at 12p. More hours of pounding. The sounds were awful. The generator wouldn't start because we were too shallow to suck water in.

We had to take turns on watch, checking the bilge, making sure we didn't actually get pushed into the rocks. At 9a, after more hours of hell, we tried to tow again and it worked!

We got towed into Marina Jacks. We stunk, we were sore, extremely bruised (my parents and wife were the most bruised). Our captain had been seasick to incapacitation and simply flopped on the docks.

Our boat is in pretty tough shape. We had to rent cars and head back towards Orlando. So, our initial plan was to make Marco island in 1 day. What we did was 39 miles in 3 days, and easily 20k in damages. We had a captain without local knowledge, and now we have a LOOOONG road of repairs and insurance.

So much 20/20 knowledge and experience gained....

Hope to have pictures soon.