The JI Dredge has finally arrived! Huzzah!

[Leprechaun]

Haven't given the boat much love the last three weeks, having to deal with my wife's knee replacement ordeal, but finally got down to my marina this morning to give her a run and lay in chart plotter tracks for the "new" Inlet channel. Went well, other than a stone-dead starting battery and an equally dead GPS sensor. Freakin' boats - its always something or other. Good thing I've got backups.

Anyway, the new channel along Lido is surprisingly deep - the lowest I saw was 17' at close to HW. They've put in a bunch of round "ball-type" buoys for added assistance, which look to me like the orange bumper ball I use to float up my second anchor. What I do not like is the way the SW wind was building waves diagonally over the bar and across that channel. But its the best we've got, so we go with it.

The big news however was the arrival of the JI Dredge - which really is a huge monster of a thing. The tugs were bringing it inbound, right down the center of the "new" Inlet channel - and it pretty much filled it all the way across. Anyway, this is a great sign for the coming season - and not a moment too soon - what with the East Jetty "channel" filling in as it did. Apologize for the sub-standard pix, tough to get a good cell phone shot while bouncing along at 20 kts.

 

[Leprechaun]

Edit to the above. Further reading on various sites indicates that the red ball buoys are actually markers for the dredge's discharge hose. I dunno as yet if this is true or not, but the floats I saw are placed pretty much exactly in line with the new red-side channel buoys that the CG used to mark this western channel. So they serve two uses, for our purposes - give us the "keep clear" from the hose and help denote the southern edge of the channel.