We left Little Shark River at approximately 0730… Wind direction had changed and was now from the Northwest and the temperature also dropped… was a bit chilly pulling the anchor this morning. I had anticipated a muddy anchor and chain, but it came up quite clean… which is nice….

We again were following FULL MOON out of the anchorage… this morning they were only 10 minutes ahead of us… After leaving the river he headed quite far offshore for some reason… We hugged the shore to get as much wind protection as we could from it… winds were NW at 15-20 knots and seas 2 to 3 feet with a few bigger rogue waves but it was a following seas and produces an entirely different ride… much more comfortable than the last couple of days pounding into the waves.

At Cabe Sable we took a 40 degree turn to follow the shoreline and the get even more wind protection from land… heading for the Florida Yacht Channel that would take us to the keys entering about Long Key area. FULL MOON left us at Cap Sable area continuing their SW path… they evidently were heading to Marathon.

I had forgotten how shallow Florida Bay is… we never saw anything over 10 feet all day… in fact most of the time we were running in 6-7 feet of water or less a few times the depth alarm sounded… it’s set to 5.5 feet.

We had not really decided where we were going to stop for the day… marina dockage is virtually nonexistent in the keys this time of year or if available so expensive we are not stopping… the max we like to pay for dockage is $2.50 per foot.. prefer the $1.00 to $1.50 per foot range… these marinas are hard to find anymore… and not it the Florida Keys for sure… cheapest I saw was $3.20 per foot and we have stayed there in the past… it’s not a fancy place and sort of run down…. SAD.

After an hour or two of browsing the available anchorage areas we came upon a state park… Lignumvitae Key. They had 5 mooring balls available and were FREE… can’t beat that. We figured when we arrived, they would be full.

We arrived at approximately 1415 and found the mooring balls… all 5 were open surprisingly… We were secure on the mooring ball for the night at approximately 1430. Our Position for the night is N24°54.619', W080°42.064'. We traveled today for 7.0 hours covering 45.81 nautical miles averaging 6.5 knots.