Friday, October 17, 2014

Oh, so blah!

Oct 16th - Big Sabine Point to Ingram Bayou

That word says it all. This was an extremely benign day, which is always a good thing when cruising on a boat.

The weather was nice, and we had a fairly short run of around 3 hours to get from Big Sabine to Ingram Bayou. Since it was a weekday, there was not much boat traffic at all. At least, not until we got in the Orange Beach area. We did pass a horde of trawlers, coming out of Big Lagoon in the Pensacola area and heading east. I figure they had all been holed up in Ingram Bayou for the last couple of days waiting for the wind to subside. It was like someone had opened the trawler floodgates!

As we came through Perdido Cut and motored along behind Ono Island, the boat traffic started picking up. There was a Mainship 40' trawler that blasted past us throwing a big wake. Most trawler owners are more courteous than that, as they know what it is like to get waked and have your stuff thrown all over the boat. I hailed  him on the radio so I could thank him, but got no reply, of course.

As we neared Ingram Bayou, and just past Bear Point Marina, the AIS alarm went off. No boats were in sight, so I checked the plotter screen. Sure enough, around the point up ahead where we could not him, was a target moving fast. AIS reported his boat name as "Gear Up", and he was doing 30 knots. I started hailing to request a slow pass, but got no answer. A few moments later he came around the point and we could see that it was a 50'+ sport fisherman, and he was throwing the monster wake of all time. At least, that is how it looked from our vantage point. I tried calling repeatedly but still no response. There was really no place for me to go, so I just started thinking about how I could minimize the effect of his wake. When he was no more than 200' away, he suddenly pulled back the throttles and slowed down. Not as much as he should, but at least enough to make his wake survivable. As they came by I saw the captain was a young guy, perhaps early 20's. Someone needs to teach that boy how to drive!  Of course, he did at least slow down some. Most of the older captains just blast past you.

Just a few minutes later we reached Ingram Bayou. As it was only 1300, we did not expect to find any boats here. We were surprised to see that there were already four boats here, one a very large Hatteras, probably around 65'. The big boat and a couple of sailboats were anchored around the mouth of the bayou, so we had to pick our way through them to get further back. Our favorite spot was already taken by a large sailboat, so we just split the difference between him and the others at the mouth. Still left a nice amount of space between us all.

So we settled in for a relaxing afternoon, and enjoyed the gorgeous weather. Forecast for tomorrow is calm wind and seas until the afternoon. So we'll get an early start and get across "The Bay" while the gettin' is good.

Sailboat in our usual anchoring location






Sunset at Ingram


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