[Public-List] Southen Serenity #72 now in Mobile, AL

[Roy Jarnagin]

Greetings:

 

I thought I might give an update on the status of Southern Serenity #72.
Since I moved to Oxford ,MS from Hollywood, FL in late 2010, she has been on
the hard in a yard in Port Charlotte. Sadly, I had not even visited her for
2 years until just before Christmas 2013. Rainwater had filled the bilge and
I suppose the opened raw water thru hull must have clogged, so I had about 6
inches of water above the floor. After a lot of cleaning, new batteries and
cables, fresh bottom paint and a new injector pump, I was able to take leave
of Port Charlotte a few days into the New Year 2014. I had a couple from
Switzerland come over to help me get the boat back in shape and the deal was
that they would have the boat in Key West for a while before I took her
north. We stopped at Marco Island and waited for a front to pass. A couple
of valuable lessons were learned there. One: you should not stand in a
Walker Bay 8 dingy and have someone hand you a 5 gal can of diesel from a
dock above shoulder level. That lesson included not only the indignity of
being dunked in the canal, but also a ruined cell phone and camera and
almost ruined outboard. Two: A sailboat with any keel depth at all cannot
navigate the route behind Marco Island. We spent a half day trying and
kedged off four or five groundings before giving up.

 

Anyway, the trip from there to Key West went well. I flew out just a few
hours after arriving and went back to work in Oxford for a couple of weeks.
The last week of January I parked my car at a marina on Mobile Bay and flew
back to Key West. Within minutes of my arrival at the boat we got underway
for a sail to Marquesas Keys where we spent a night and enjoyed a feast of
freshly speared fish before heading north toward Ft. Myers Beach. I spend a
few days in the mooring field at Ft. Myers Beach while a front passed and my
friends caught their flight back to Switzerland. A friend from Atlanta
arrived the same day and we quickly made preparations for the trip to
Mobile. We were blessed with a few days of flat seas so we spend Super Bowl
weekend in the Gulf of Mexico heading straight toward Dog Island and the
east pass into St. George Bay. This trip gave me plenty of opportunity to
experience fog and that is what we had the night we went through the pass
and anchored near Carrabelle, FL. (I am glad the boat had radar installed by
a previous owner.) 

 

All went well as we made our way east in the Intracostal Waterway over the
next few days. It was a little cool at times with temperatures down to the
mid 30's. Probably the biggest frustration of the trip was that I was not
able to get the Force 10 Cozy Cabin heater to work. I tried the diesel /
mineral spirits mix, kerosene (acquired at about $13 for a gallon and a very
long walk to Ace Hardware on Marco Island), and Coleman camp stove fuel. Now
Southern Serenity is moored at Grand Mariner Marina on Dog River, just off
Mobile Bay. I should be able to get down there at least once every couple of
months to do maintenance - and maybe even sail once and while.

 

 

Roy Jarnagin

 

Southern Serenity #72