May 2026
We Left Cape Canaveral in December. We Just Sailed Back In. — Nobad Weather Fam
The boatyard. The splash. The tears at the dock. The props lost on launch day. All of it happened here. And now, eight months and 1,000 nautical miles later, we just motored back into this same channel and felt every single bit of it.
This Place Made Us
If you’ve been with us from the beginning — Episodes 3 through 12 of the documentary — you know what Cape Canaveral means to this family.
This is where we lived on the hard for months, doing a full refit of SV Nobad Weather while our kids grew up in a boatyard. Windows. Floors. Panic. A boatyard birthday. Thanksgiving somewhere we never imagined spending it. The endless, grinding, never-quite-done work of taking a boat that needed everything and turning it into a home that could cross an ocean.
Episode 12 was the splash. December 19th, 2025. The morning the boat went back in the water. Sam cried the moment they finished tying off to the dock. Not pretty crying — the kind of crying that comes from months of stress finally finding a place to go. We did it. We are done with the boatyard. Tomorrow we set sail.
And then they did. And then Fort Pierce happened. And then the Keys, and the Gulf Stream, and Bimini, and the Berry Islands, and the Bahamas, and the long sail home.
And now, eight months later: the same massive channel. The same waterway. The same anchorage. Different boat. Different family. Better sailors, harder-earned.
We left here December 19th. We’re back now. And it is surreal in the best possible way.
Getting Here: Fort Pierce Exit, 8-Foot Waves, 11 Hours North
Getting out of Fort Pierce was, characteristically, Fort Pierce’s parting gift to us.
After a week of anchor dancing, thunderstorms, Josh’s brilliant rudder-angle fix for the tidal chaos, and one very earned Dr. Pepper — we picked up anchor Thursday morning and pointed north.
The Fort Pierce channel exit is notorious, and we got a reminder of why. We’d timed our arrival perfectly at slack tide. Our departure was different. The moment we hit the jetties, we were riding 8-foot waves. SV Nima was right behind us and we could see their keels twice. It was wild, brief, and then behind us — headsail out, open ocean, gentler sea state.
Eleven hours. 6.5 knots. Cape Canaveral.
The Lock: New Territory We Were Absolutely Nervous About
This time we didn’t go to Scorpion Marine — we went through the bridge and lock into the ICW waterways. We’ve done bascule bridges. The lock was entirely new.
The bridge operator: great, no issues.
The lock master: a man of extraordinarily few words. His complete communication to us was essentially move your boat outside the gate and wait — then silence. We hailed him repeatedly on the radio. Nothing. So we just slowly crept our boats forward in the wind and current, SV Nima right behind us, waiting for a door to open at someone else’s discretion.
Eventually he responded. The door opened. We motored in, tied off to the sea wall inside, and Raegan helped get the fenders and dock lines sorted. The door closed. The lock filled. Thirty minutes total.
When we came out the other side, we looked at each other and laughed. We’d been dreading that for days. Once we did it, it wasn’t that big a deal. As with so many things in this life — the anticipation is the hardest part.
And then, immediately outside the lock: SV Makani Moku. Our angel buddy boat. The one that helped navigate our boat when we were brand new and overwhelmed, whose friends drove Josh two hours to Fort Lauderdale and back on Christmas Eve to get the prop parts. We motored straight over and dropped anchor next to them. Some reunions don’t need words.
Cape Canaveral Life: Rockets, Mozzarella Sticks, and the Solar Panels That Finally Changed Everything
We settled in. Life found its Cape Canaveral rhythm.
Memorial Day morning, we watched a Starlink rocket launch from the cockpit. Pajamas, coffee, front row seats — the launch pads are right there. Locals pulled off the highway to watch. Crowds lined the shore near us. This is just what living here looks like.
The kids finally got to pick their own groceries — a rare treat when you’re usually ordering delivery to a remote dock. Finn: mozzarella sticks. Raegan: Rice-a-Roni. Skylar: ice cream drumsticks, which required immediate consumption because ice cream and boat life are fundamentally incompatible. Everyone says: just eat it on land or get an ice cream maker. They’re right.
Josh finished wiring all four solar panels. This is the solar arch that started as a project in Bimini, that followed us through the Berry Islands, that came home with us across the Gulf Stream still not quite done. Here, in Cape Canaveral — the same anchorage where we splashed this boat back in December — Josh finally got the last panel connected and sat there watching the battery readout like it was the best TV he’d ever seen.
400% more solar capacity. Batteries charging faster than ever. Running kitchen appliances without touching the generator. Months of stress and frustration, visible from the beginning of this documentary, finally bearing fruit in the same waters where the whole journey started.
Sam stood there watching Josh watch the batteries charge and thought: look how far we’ve come.
Josh also surprised Sam with a Chick-fil-A sandwich on Thursday. They hadn’t had one in so long. It was glorious. This is what passes for romance on a sailboat and they are fully here for it.
The fruit fly infestation — brought on by hot humid no-wind days and composting toilets — required full exterminator mode. Improvements noted. The composting toilets are on the replacement list for marina season. This was quite the mental challenge for this anchorage.
The Night the Sky Turned Orange
Thursday night. Family card game night. Dark outside. Everything quiet.
Then the entire boat lit up orange.
We looked outside. A massive fireball. An explosion. One of the Blue Origin rockets, destroyed during a test — right there, by the launch pads they’d been anchored next to all week. Many of their readers saw it in the news. The NOBAD crew watched it live from the cockpit in real time. The rocket was completely destroyed. So was the launch pad.
read about it here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgzl5wd8xeo
Sam caught some of it on video.
Not on the boatyard bingo card. Not on the sailing bingo card. Just one of those things this life hands you that no other life would.
1,000 Nautical Miles
Somewhere in all of this — the lock nerves, the solar triumph, the fireball in the sky, the mozzarella sticks — we hit a milestone.
Over 1,000 nautical miles sailed.
From the Dec 19th splash at Scorpion Marine — nervous wrecks docking a boat they’d never moved in the water before, threading a narrow channel lined with million-dollar boats — through the Keys, the Bahamas crossing, Bimini, the Berry Islands, the Gulf Stream home, and north up the East Coast.
1,000 miles. On a boat we fixed up with our own hands while our kids grew up in a boatyard. With three kids and a dog aboard. On a route we had no idea we could do when we first splashed back into this same water eight months ago.
We didn’t make a ceremony of it. The big milestones in this life tend to sneak up on you. But this one deserves a moment.
Threading the Needle to St. Augustine
By Friday, the weather window looked good and they were ready to move. Buddy boats hauled out at Scorpion for maintenance — we departed alone.
First solo overnight passage in a while. About 20 hours to St. Augustine. Calm seas. One bail-out inlet halfway. Florida summer thunderstorms demanding constant radar attention.
At 1pm we picked up anchor. The bridle immediately snagged a submerged crab pot — ten minutes of untangling, nothing serious, deeply annoying. From that moment the whole trip north was threading needles: catching the lock just as it opened for eastbound boats (this time the lock master was kind enough to hold it), timing our exit between cruise ship arrivals (we waved to passengers on their balconies as we motored past — passengers waved back), watching radar the entire way.
St. Augustine is next. A mooring ball. A proper town. And — if the timing works — a reunion several buddy boats!
We left Cape Canaveral better than they arrived. That’s the whole point.
🌊 Capt. Josh, Admiral Sam, and our salty crew
Watch the full video on YouTube | Start from the beginning at Episodes 3–12 | Weekly faith & family content on Patreon | Daily life on Instagram
Continue the Journey:
- Episode 12: We SPLASHED! The moment it all became real
- Episode 14: Christmas in Ft. Pierce — when it almost ended
- Fort Pierce: Déjà Vu, the Current, and Why We’re Never Anchoring Here Again
Tags: Cape Canaveral sailing, Canaveral lock, Blue Origin rocket explosion, Starlink launch boat, 1000 nautical miles sailing, sailboat refit Cape Canaveral, liveaboard family, sailing with kids, No Bad Weather Fam, solar panels sailboat, East Coast cruising, St. Augustine sailing, family sailing vlog, faith over fear, overnight passage, Scorpion Marine Cape Canaveral, ICW sailing Florida, cruising family milestone, boatyard to bluewater