Peanut Island, FL Daysail

[bilbo]

For anyone not familiar, Peanut Island is a manmade island located in Lake Worth lagoon in South Florida. It's near West Palm Beach, and was apparently created when the ICW channel was dredged. It was named after a peanut oil shipping operation that failed, and also is home to a bunker that was built for JFK during the cold war. The island was renovated in 2005 with a man-made reef and swimming/snorkeling area and a bunch of campsites. We had never been there before and thought it would be interesting to check out, so we planned a trip on Good Friday as the weather looked perfect.

There's a ferry service that runs back and forth from Palm Beach to the island all day, but we decided to use our Daysailer to go. I apologize in advance I'm not great at documenting my trips as I'm usually busy handling logistics, operating the boat, and trying to enjoy the experience myself to take good photos but here goes.

According to internet wisdom the best time for snorkeling is right around high tide, which was around 9:45 that day. We arrived at about 8:30 at a place called Lake Park Marina to launch the boat. It costs $10 to launch but it's clean, orderly, and there are attendants there making sure people follow the rules and helping as needed. The public ramp nearby apparently can be a bit hectic according to reviews. They also offer overnight parking for people going to the Bahamas. I was really glad to have the control offered by our little outboard as there were lots of large, costly boats nearby that I didn't want to bump into. The breeze wasn't making it into the harbor anyway due to all the huge boats. Once we were out into Lake worth we hoisted the sails and off we went. It was about a half to three-quarter mile sail to the island and being early in the morning it wasn't real busy. The breeze was nice and steady between 8-12kts so we made good time, until we had to figure out this:



Definitely the largest craft I'd ever been around while boating, they were pulling this out of one of the big docks with tugboats. They had to come out of the dock channel and make a turn into the ICW. Rather than pass them only to have them pass me again, we let our sails out a bit to slow down, and weaved through the anchorage nearby. They completed their turn and tugged off, and we fell in place behind them. There were a few people already on the West side of the island with their boats beached. It was around 9AM. I would later find out these people had the right idea.



We also saw Jimmy Buffet's boat hehe:



We continued around the island to the East side, and saw the protected lagoon with the reefs and all that stuff. At the NE corner there are a bunch of day-use docks, but I decided to beach the boat rather than use those. This ended up being a mistake. The beach was directly across from the inlet, so the wind was creating decent choppy waves that made beaching impractical. We anchored the boat near the shore, like everyone else was doing, but I noticed the beach area was getting pretty crowded and worried I wouldn't be able to leave with all of the swimmers, so we pulled the anchor up and moved over to the dock. That was much better, we had a picnic lunch there and I felt a lot better about walking away from the boat and exploring a little bit.



There's a trail that goes completely around the island, and several sandy beach areas. There are bathrooms and showers with running water, but don't use any of the campground facilities unless camping. I failed to see the sign and was promptly booted from their picnic shelter while taking a phone call from my Wife. From 'outside the fence' the campground looked nice but apparently it's difficult to get a reservation. If I do any camping I'll probably do the spoil islands in Indian River Lagoon to the north as those are a bit more secluded. We spent a couple hours snorkeling and saw many different kinds of fish and coral. My son got to see a ray and thought that was pretty neat, definitely worth the trip.

We left the island at around 3PM and I immediately noticed Lake Worth was much busier. Sailing back was not the same nice, relaxing experience. There were loads of boats around, and it was basically a cycle of sail, get waked, stabilize the boat and re-trim, repeat. I don't know where any of these people were going but it was clear they were in a hurry to get there. We did see a guy in a Finn; it was neat to see another dinghy sailor in that mess.

I was also introduced to tidal currents. There was a point on the West side of the island where you could see the water was definitely moving, with standing waves all over the place. We were on a broad reach, and the boat was doing about 5kt, and the SOG according to GPS fell down to 0.5kt. It was a weird feeling, the boat was moving so fast through the water but not going anywhere. Also with the low tide we bumped our CB a couple of times. I'm glad I installed that self-releasing cleat a couple years back!

We had a great time sailing and messing around on the island, but I don't think I'll do it on a weekend again. The morning was fantastic but the afternoon trip back to the launch was not real fun. I'm told weekdays are a lot less busy. In spite of that, the boat delivered us to and from our destination without injury or any real fear for our lives and I can't ask for much more than that.

[GreenLake]

Nice writeup. What's the distance you covered?

[bilbo]

Thanks, approximating off of Google Earth, it was probably only around 5 miles or so of sailing. I did have my GPS going, but it acts funny about tracks sometimes and didn't split things up like it usually does. It has me starting at home (where it was last shut off), magically transporting to the marina, completing the trip until I shut it off, then magically transporting home again where I plugged it into my PC. For some reason I can't split off the portion of the track that was actually sailing. I'm sure there's a way but I'm a bit rusty with my Garmin and Basecamp skills so I need to play with it some more.

[GreenLake]

If you have Windows, there's an app called GPS Track editor that I use and like for cleaning up tracks and making thumbnails I paste into my personal sailing diary.

[bilbo]

Thanks, GreenLake. I'll have to check that app out. In the meantime I was able to split off our track in Basecamp and it looks like we traveled 6.9 miles total.

[GreenLake]

Looks like your software is similar in what it can do. Mine doesn't do the arrows, but I use a setting where it color codes speed. It turns out that the walking/jogging setting works well with the DS. It looks like the island creates interesting channels instead of a simple open body of water. That should make navigation a bit more interesting.

What I found noteworthy is that you are apparently sailing uphill a lot (looking at the elevation data ).

I sometimes grab just the track and overlay it manually on a excerpt of a nautical chart from the online NOAA chart viewer. Depending on where you sail, that can be very interesting, because some details that are relevant to navigating on water are not always present on street maps. However, the blue lines seem to be depth contours?

Here's what NOAA chart 11459 (2023 edition) shows me:

PeanutIslandFl.JPG (60.36 KiB) Viewed 12868 times

Looks like there are a lot of marks in the water. Also, there seems to be some discrepancy NE of the bridge. Interesting.

[bilbo]

I like the color idea, it would be cool to see speed represented in the track. That would really show the spots where we found current working against us. Basecamp is what Garmin provides for working with their handheld GPS units. It's not great in my opinion, however, it works for most of the stuff I need to do and the older I get the less I want to learn new software platforms. Garmin can be kind of finicky with their hardware and compatibility. They don't like third party stuff at all.

Truly close-hauled is when you can go upwind and uphill! I don't know for sure, but I believe that elevation data comes from the barometer built into my handheld. I believe they include it for trekking and climbing in mountainous areas; I've never really used it and I don't know how great the accuracy is. It also tracks pressure supposedly to help with weather prediction when in the woods. The map is just a free Florida topo map I found. The contours came from USGS data, but I'm not sure how accurate they are in the water.

The chart is very busy around there. It's indicative of reality, there are boats anchored all over the place and lots of traffic with the inlet. There are boat-related things all over the shore of the mainland there. We saw plenty of megayachts and the shops that service them. It was kind of strange sailing around in our little $1000 dinghy with $1000000+ boats so close by. One of the boats in the anchorage had a rooster on board too that was crowing off and on throughout the day.

I see the discrepancy on my map, not sure what's going on there but the chart's definitely right. Maybe there's a sandbar there and the shading limits in the map software saw it as land or something. The public launch I referred to earlier is there.

[GreenLake]

Well, I must have gotten mine before they delivered software with it/for it. I'm using a different program to download the data in gpx format and then I do my edits and display with the GPS Track Editor. That one used to support more map types, but being free software, the only one that still works is "Open Street Map" which is about like the one you have, minus the contours. However, I can copy an image of the track and manually place it on a chart snippet I have, if I want to see where I sailed relative to navigation aids, shoals and so on. NOAA has an online viewer where I can get a PDF.

The chart for your region is 11459 and if you view it at 100% size it shows a lot more detail than you can see from the screen shot. Part of that missing area is labeled "discontinued spoil area" and some maps may have that in their database and treat it like land. However, overlaid is an area labeled "Obstruction Fish Haven, authorized min depth 6ft". That would indicate that things are well below the surface.

I've come across that before that maps simply have items added/missing in their databases (related to features that are unchanged for decades) and are being published without correction year after year. Local street map used to be missing a named avenue for a mile-long segment, and it marks our street an "arterial". That may reflect planning data from decades ago, but never was. I think charts are a bit more actively maintained (except for depth soundings, which may represent some long ago measurement).

I can see a lot of docks and marinas along the shore. As you write, that means that there's a lot to see, and perhaps more interesting for your crew than if you sail along pristine beaches. If you look closely that are also at least three marked wrecks.

[bilbo]

OSM is actually pretty good from what I've found. I have a set of Garmin's nautical charts on my handheld, but unfortunately it doesn't cover coastal just inland lakes. It also doesn't work especially well on the handheld because it's not really designed for it. This is in spite of several assurances from Garmin that it would work fine before I purchased the mapset. Thanks for the chart link, I have been using the navionics online viewer but I like being able to see the actual sheet on the PC.

For many years, the road to the house I grew up in wouldn't display on GPS. When routing started becoming popular it would place the house in an adjacent neighborhood whose road didn't connect to ours. You could drive to that spot and kind of see the side yard of our house through the woods but couldn't actually get there. I guess it reinforces the importance of traditional navigation methods such as map/compass or celestial navigation. I read somewhere recently that the US military has resumed training in those areas as they had become so reliant on GPS.

On the wrecks, I've noticed down here that abandoned & derelict boats are somewhat commonplace. There were more than a few in the anchorages on our sail that were obviously not in working condition and some that were half sunk. Still others are fully sunk like the ones on the charts. There are even a few in Lake Okeechobee. When going through the channel out to the lake proper you can see the superstructure of some sunken craft just to the North. It's strange seeing that having grown up in Minnesota, where the DNR strictly enforces prompt recovery of anything sunk in their lakes.