I was tired last night and didn’t feel like doing the job of figuring out the best time to leave the anchorage this morning. I mean really, how bad would it be if we leave late and end up wishing we’d left earlier? It’s just current. Those were the voices in my head trying to talk me into crashing immediately. Thankfully I ignored them.
There were three channels of interest in todays passage, but it isn’t really necessary to figure more than one of them because they all turn at roughly the same time, or within half an hour of each other. Of course you don’t know that unless you figure more than one.
What I found was the water between last night’s anchorage and tonight’s anchorage flows northward, until 4:40am when it turns to ebb. That means the earlier we leave the better. It turns northward again at 2:41pm, so we needed to arrive at tonight’s anchorage before then.
And that’s how it played out. The anchor was up before 7am and we rode the tide South with an extra two knots of boat speed most of the way. We saw four knots of current though a narrow pinch point, giving us 9.3 knots over the ground with 5.3 knots through the water.
Had the current been flowing the opposite direction our speed over ground would have been 1.3 knots at that point and we’d have averaged 3 knots instead of 7. The day’s four hour passage would have taken us ten hours.
Now that’s worth losing a little sleep for.
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