"2000, December 10-11 Wild Current at River Narrows" Port Orange by grandmaR

Gas dock at Seven Seas

It is still foggy at 10:30. We call Seven Seas Marina, and they have space for us. It continues to be foggy. Sometimes we can't see more than a quarter mile. We see a man in a power boat in the fog pulling his kids on an inner tube. Stupid.

We tie up in the slip behind the fuel dock at 12:54 after 32.7 miles at 6.4 mph for a total of 885 nm. The charge at this marina is more for the 2nd day than the first day. We have a late lunch at the marina diner. I have broccoli and cheese omelet and Bob has BLT. Bob decides to walk to see if he can find transmission sealer and ends up walking all the way to Publix and then taking the bus back. I try to download pocketmail and the pay phone won't work with my pocketmail device. We leave to walk down to the bridge for dinner, and the pay phone there works fine for pocketmail. Prices are reasonable - I have swordfish. Then we stop at a little ice cream stand and get ice cream to eat while we walk back to the boat (about 1/2 mile). In the photo, the yellow boat is on the gas dock, and we were on the other side of the dock from where they are.

Marina from shore in 2005

Bob decided to take a taxi to an auto parts store this morning, and bought some transmission sealer, and put it in the transmission. It was still really foggy. He wanted to go up and have breakfast - but I wanted to make some calls at the pay phone. So he didn't eat either.

When I went back to the boat to get the numbers I needed to make the calls, Bob had started the boat. He was very impatient to leave even though it was foggy. I wasn't ready to leave. I really wasn't even that sure that we should leave today at all. It was still pretty foggy. When I got back the next time, he was in a really bad mood. So we got ready to leave.

Bob had a plan for getting out of the slip. Unfortunately, someone tried to help us, and with that help and the unexpectedly strong current everything went to hell in a handcart in a very short period of time. When Bob tried to back out of the slip, the current (at right angles to the slip) pushed the stern backwards into the marina, and down onto the boats that had been in slips parallel to us. I was frantically trying to fend off of people's dinghys.

Soon a lot of people had gathered (about 25) to help, or to defend their boats. More people than we had seen in the past whole day. Our boat had been carried into another sailboat, and so the helpers pulled the boat forward away from the other boat (which was sticking out of the slip a little farther than the power boat next to it. Unfortunately, with the boat forward, the bowsprit was now between the last two pilings in our former slip and overhanging the fuel dock. One of the marina guys said that if anyone passed the marina, the movement of the boats in the resulting wake could cause damage (cheerful and helpful). Someone else commented that we'd have to be careful or we'd get caught cross ways in the marina. The lady on the power boat kept telling me that it would be OK, and then saying that she felt so helpless. I periodically had to fend us off her hard dinghy.

I looked up and Bob had a big round deep hole scrape in the center of his forehead, which was bleeding, and he also got his arm caught between the dinghy and some other item - I didn't see that, but I heard people yelling at him to get his arm out, but he told me later that it had been caught and he couldn't move it.

Some nice man named Eric got into his dinghy and took a line and rowed it across to an opposing pier and people over there tried to pull the stern out. They couldn't. We took the dinghy off the davits. Of course the first thing that happened was it was pushed into the engine exhaust which made a very funny rude noise. Finally they took another line to the opposite pier and people pulled the bow out a little when Bob put forward power on. Then we tried with a line on the jib winch and winched the boat out sideways. Eric then took another line over to another pier closer to the entrance and people pulled on that line. As we pulled the stern out into the channel, the guys on the fuel dock were able to push the bow out around the last piling, and then we were more or less in the channel. We were almost home free, and it only required a little more maneuvering before we were heading out into the channel.

Both of us were exhausted and Bob was still bleeding. And it was still foggy, and actually had started to rain. It was also after 10 o'clock.

The big problem was, we had wanted to go to Titusville next, and with the late start, I didn't think we could travel the over 40 miles and get there. There was no place listed that we could anchor short of Titusville, and the only marinas between Port Orange and there were in New Smyrna Beach only about 10 or 11 miles farther.

We decided on New Smyrna Beach

• Pros:Senior citizens can ride the buses cheaply on Sunday
• Cons:A lot of current on the river
• In a nutshell:South of Daytona Beach