26 foot catalina open water?

I agree with all the previous posts. You need to be able to wait on good weather. And figure out what your next closest safe harbor every time you leave your anchorage in the morning. That way if the weather turns bad unexpectedly you will automatically know where and how far a fast dash to safety is.

Marco Island gets a bad rap for not liking people anchoring out. And it's true that the powers that be don't like it but there isn't much that they can do about it either. I work at a marina on Marco and there are plenty of boats that anchor, sometimes for very long periods of time.

As for doing a long range navigation in a 26 ft boat my mind has been somewhat changed on what can be done. The other day a couple showed up at the marina looking for gas in a water blasted 26 ft Hunter. They said they came down from South Carolina did they Keys the Bahamas and were just in Marco. They have a blog, it's called nautical nitwits.blogspot or something like that. I looked it up but didn't get a chance to actually look at it to see if there stories lined up with what they told me.

That seems like too much for a 26 ft water ballasted boat, but they had no complaints.