If we’d been more flexible and perhaps a bit smarter we would have left yesterday. A beautiful 10 knot breeze from the west and 1.5 foot waves offshore. We could have had a sleepy sail to our next destination. Heck I didn’t look too close but we may have skipped our next destination and gone right up to the destination after that.

But no. We have a few things to do this coming week and we’ve paid through Saturday at the marina.

6 days left. So that is when I start to compulsively start to check the weather forecast. Now the weather forecast this far out is horribly inaccurate so there is no telling what the weather will really be in a week but I can’t help myself.

I like to come up with several plans.

Plan A is always extend our stay. If we’re in a good spot, either in a marina or at anchor and I don’t like the weather we just stay longer.

Plan B is always the “fantasy plan” if everything were perfect what would we do? In this case we are leaving St. Augustine and turning north. We have an “aggressive” goal and hope to be in Newport RI (or Block Island) by at least mid May so that Liam and make it to New Bedford Mass to take an STCW class. So the “fantasy plan” would be to pop out into the ocean and head all the way to Cape Fear, pull in and grab a mooring in Carolina Beach NC.

Plans C & D are when things start to get realistic. What are the two more realistic plans given the weather and what if the weather isn’t quite what we want. So Plan C is hopping out into the ocean and doing an overnight to Cumberland Island GA and hang there for a perfect weather window to either Charleston or Cape Fear. Plan D will be going through the ICW and take two days instead of a single overnight.

And all of this will depend on the weather and the tides.

The tides are simple and you can find the tides in all the major weather tools, most modern chart plotters/apps, and of course there is the little yellow book. So for our departure we know we have to leave at slack tide so just a little while after the high or low tide. This is especially important in strong tidal areas such as St. Augustine. It’s simply not safe to get off the dock here if it’s not slack.

The weather of course changes more frequently and is a bit less predictable. So I tend to keep my eyes on both PredictWind and Windy. I’m looking for as close to 10 knots as I can, lower is okay if I’m willing to use the motor, and sometimes I have to if we are having one of our famous electrical issues, and then I’m looking at wind direction, and finally the wave height. I like to avoid going out in anything predicted to be 4feet or higher in wave height because I’ve found that if the forecast is predicting 3 feet of waves you can often find yourselves in 6 feet. So I don’t want to go out when 5 feet are forecasted and find myself in 10 foot waves.

But that’s for the ocean. For the IntraCoastal Waterway I’m a bit less concerned with wave height and will go in anything less than 15-20 knots of wind. I’m more concerned with the currents through the different cuts and canals.

While I’ve been obsessively checking and rechecking the forcast for our departure I’ve seen a wind from the ocean to shore and waves from 3 feet to over 6 feet. And it’s just changing all the time. So we watch and wait.