removehtml]We had some company over the holiday weekend and decide that Sunday was the day to go sailing. We knew a cold front was passing through on Saturday night and what I had feared happened. A northerly wind was blowing the water out of Tampa Bay. Low astronomical tide had passed at around 7 AM and here we were at noon with barely 6 inches of water under our keel. We dropped our lines and decided to go. We have three problem spots that we needed to clear so when we hit bottom approaching the first the boat was turned around and we anchored in a small cove next to the canal to have lunch. For about an hour we watched the water go up another 4 inches. We pulled up anchor and went to try it again theis time we cleared the first and second spots and although hit bottom on the third we were able to skip over it. Wind was blowing 16-18 knots and latter as we were coming back it picked up to 20-24 knots. We were out around 4 hours so we figured the tide must have gone up but we had not factored the effect of the increase in wind speed. We barely made it out with many readings of 0.0 and a bump and barely made it back in this time with three bumps. It was a nice sail and we were glad we were able to take our company out. We put one reef on the main and with full jib the boat was consistenly doing in excess of 7 knots. The water was full of white caps but the waves were only two footers. We only saw one sailboat out there which watched us go out and quickly came in. It looked like he had been waiting. We saw some commercial traffic and the Carnival Cruise ship heading down the Bay as we were returning. We kept telling the ladies not to worry that there was plenty of food aboard in case we got stuck.Error: Error: expected [/URL], but found [/removehtml] instead[/removehtml]