April 8 - Hurricane Harbour

Dolphin in Hurricane Harbour

We are still in Hurricane Harbour. There have been two possible weather windows forecast, but when the days came the weather wasn't as promised and we could not go. Frustrating, but we have only been here a week, and we have heard of people waiting 3 weeks or more.The last couple of nights have had thunderstorms, and they are doozies! A reminder to get those window leaks fixed!
This is a beautiful spot. It is a small, mitten shaped harbour. We are in the hand part of the mitten, there is a little side area that is the thumb part of the mitten, and the entrance to the bay is the wrist of the mitten. We are surrounded by lovely homes with their own boats and have a view of Miami from our stern. Large and small local boat cruise by once of twice a day to check out their neighbour's homes.There is no where to get off the boat here, but that works for us as we are just waiting to cross the Gulf Stream. Dolphins come in once or twice a day to fish, and often pass under the boat as they chase their dinner. Fish skim the surface like skipping stones trying to escape them but the dolphins always catch their treat and come up "smiling" with a fish half out of their mouths. There is a manatee in here too, that we catch tantalizing glimpses of just before he submerges again. Maybe that is why sailors found them fascinating - they could never see them properly!
We had our first swim yesterday, to scrub some of the growth off the hull.The water is a lovely temperature. There is a bird nearby that imitates all sorts of sounds. He loves doing a cell phone ring, but also imitates a person whistling a song. He does such a good job we still aren't totally sure it is a bird!
As it stands now, the next weather window is this coming Saturday.(but that could change!)We will move to a marina tomorrow for a night, to get caught up on mundane things like laundry, garbage disposal, etc.

April 1& 2 - Going Urban

Part of Hurricane Harbour

Giftwrap it (look carefully)

Driving Downtown

Upsizing

Lettuce Lake

Down a side street

Home at Vero Beach

April 1/08Mar

Today was a slow day, as we had lots of bridges to call, and wait for them to open. The further south we go, the more bridges have schedules that we have to adhere to.

Once we hit Vero Beach and areas south the scenery started to change from lovely natural surroundings to eye candy of a different type. If you are into admiring houses, this is a voyeur's paradise. Beautiful homes line the length of the ICW but in Florida they seem even more so. The landscaping makes them stand out, as everything is green and manicured, with lovely blooming hibiscus and bougainvillea.
The further south we got, the more elaborate the houses. The ICW itself has little water roads leading off it, like side streets, with people's boats parked outside their door.

We are right in town now, with building all around.We anchored in a spot called Lettuce Lake, just a pond sized opening off the waterway, surrounded by homes and apartment houses.

April 2/08

Our last day! These past three days we have made little mileage because of the bridges. And each day has been a little more frustrating. Today we seem to have trouble getting the bridges to hear us on our radio. We read that this seems to happen to quite a few people! The Las Olas Bridge in Fort Lauderdale, with a scheduled opening, would not answer our repeated hailing, and then didn't open when he was supposed to! He said he hadn't heard us, and we had to wait another half and hour, treading water. That can be very stressful in a crowded waterway.
Part of the ICW here is wall to wall concrete, so that the wake from passing speedboats sloshes back and forth as though in a bathtub. That's not too much fun when you are in a slow moving sailboat and being bounced about.
But the sights are never boring, and we are kept constantly amazed by all we see. We passed Miami Harbour and into Biscayne Bay. The water has that lovely bluey-green that lets us know we have nearly arrived.
We are anchored in Hurricane Harbour at the south end of Key Biscayne, where Chris and our friend Dan anchored the first night they moved the boat north. Chris says the harbour looks bigger this time round. The Bahamas are just under 50 miles away due east, and we are waiting for the right weather conditions to cross.
The ICW through Florida has been wonderful. I wasn't looking forward to it because people were talking of the recent legislation making everything so boater unfriendly; anchoring was being discouraged, marinas were supposed to be so expensive, and it was a "concrete jungle". In the end, the northern section was full of natural beauty, and the urban areas were definitely eyecatching too. We anchored out every night with no problem. I don't know if it would have been different if we tried to linger anywhere, but as it was,it was all great.

March 31 - Reached Lake Worth,Palm Beach

The Bahamas ferry

After checking the weather to see if the storm woud ease, we continued down the Indian River. Once we got underway conditions were fine. We finally left it at it's mouth near St.Lucie Inlet and continuing down to South Palm Beach, where we anchored in Lake Worth. It is a popular spot for cruisers to exit onto the Atlantic, along with large tankers and container ships. We saw a boat that looked just like a child's picture book rendition of a passenger ship - I think it was the high-speed ferry that leaves for the Bahamas. Very evocative.

March 29 & 30 - Indian River

Island for a Day
The smoke from the fire is behind it.
The Kennedy Space Center is just out of picture on the left

March 29/08

We are really zipping along, and did 70 miles today! The day started off well with a manatee sighting right in New Smyrna. Then we followed the Mosquito Lagoon & Indian River for all day,passing the site of the Kennedy Space Center. There must have been a large fire to the south of it, as there was a column of smoke which filled the sky for the whole day and dropped large chunks of ash all over the boat. We had the hatches open because of the heat, and realized too late that we were getting ash all inside the boat too.
The Indian River is lovely, a fisherman's dream. You could spend weeks here puttering about in your boat in it's large stretches of shallow water. It was windless and calm when we were there - maybe it's not so nice when it is windy.
I have been enjoying the cormorants on this trip. They have a way of coming up after they have dived under the water with a completely confused air and looking around from side to side. A combination of "who turned out the lights?" and "where am I?" Chris thinks it is more accurately described as the look of a person who has broken wind in public and is miming his total innocence. I don't know where he gets that from!
I saw a really amusing sight just before we anchored for the evening. On the last of our many dolphin sightings I was dismayed to see one that looked quite deformed. I have been so impressed the whole length of the IntraCoastal as to the healthy look of the waterway and it's inhabitants, but this dolphin had something terribly wrong with it's tail. Every time it did one of it's graceful curves through the water it's tail showed a nasty growth. With the help of the binoculars it was resolved. The dolphin was flipping up a cormorant with it's tail every time it rose, and the cormorant was in a completely confused state as to what was happening! The dolphin picked the cormorant up over three times before the cormorant managed to break the cycle!

March 30/08

Another 70 mile day and we are still on the Indian River. It's character changes as we go south, but it is always beautiful and a boater's dream. There are many one- or two-people sized islands, with a small boat pulled up to it, a little tent on it and a white sand beach in front. We saw lots of small family groups getting ready to enjoy a day or two on "their" island. The river is very wide in most places, but often so shallow that people can be standing knee deep fishing just a few yards from the area we are sailing on. Maybe it's a good thing our depth finder isn't working!
Our anchorage was just south of a bridge at Jensen Beach.Another pretty spot, but it turned out to be a very rolly place to spend the night. A storm went through and we didn't have much shelter from it at all.
Along the way we saw some of what we understand annoys Florida legislators about boaters. There is a strong move to regulate cruisers quite firmly, and as a body cruisers are very concerned about what they perceive an erosion of their long held rights. Local and state governement in Florida, on the other hand, seems to feel that a lot of cruisers are taking advantage of those rights to spend years in one spot, often on unsightly and unsafe boats, and being an eyesore and a hazard. We have seen a few of these boats as we have travelled through Florida, and I can certainly understand why you would want to try and move them. All the ones we have seen have been abandoned and left to deteriorate. There is nothing sadder than an unloved boat.

March 28 - reached New Smyrna

Bridge at Daytona

After nearly 60 miles today we anchored near New Smyrna, just off the Ponce de Leon inlet from the Atlantic. There are cautions about this inlet as there are continual changes in the positions of the shoals. It was pretty tricky without the depthfinder, but we made it! We have been using a lead line when anchoring to check on the depth, though the charts and GPS help a lot. We could see the Atlantic surf spray from our anchorage, maybe half a mile away.
It was a popular spot with local boaters. Apart from the fishermen there were speedboats dragging rubber tubes behind them and giving the riders a great ride, to judge from the squeals.
We passed through a few bridges today, most of them fixed, and there was a lovely one in Daytona that stood out. It's pillars had mosaic images of dolphins, and there were cast concrete scallop shells along it's upper edge. Very pretty.

March 27 - St. Johns river and St.Augustine

Tanker on St.Johns river

Today we crossed the St. John's river, which leads to Jacksonville. We very nearly ran aground, again through confusion with the charts. The ICW route sort of spits you out into these larger waterways, so that from meandering down a narrow, quiet creek we were suddenly thrust out into a big river, with a "secure area" naval vessel on one side, a huge tanker crossing right in front of us and blocking our route, and no room to manouever. So we bobbed about in one spot after clearing out of the secure area and waited for the tanker to move. A SeaTow inflatable came up and asked if we were ok. We thanked him and told him we were just waiting for the tanker to move. Once the tanker had moved out of our path we found it blocked by piles of rocks right where our path should be! So we decided to skirt them to the east and bypass them that way. We hadn't gone too far when the SeaTow vessel came roaring up to us and told us that if we kept going the way we were going we would aground! We thanked him profusely and told him our charts were wrong. With hindsight, I think maybe I read the charts wrong! It was very nice of him. The St.John's is a pretty busy river and Chris counted 5 tankers passing in the time we were there.
We also went through St.Augustine, the oldest European city in North America. There is an old fort, and the old part of the city has a lovely Spanish look to it. We had to wait for the Bridge of Lions to open. It's schedule has been erratic for the last couple of years as they are repairing it, and have a temporary one in place, but it was only half and hour wait, so not too bad.
After anchoring south of St.Augustine we figured out we had done just under 55 miles, so not too shabby.

March 26- Heading south from Brunswick

A Submarine at St. Marys

Finally, we started out from Brunswick! We had been waiting for a pump out of our holding tank (sewage), part of the reason for our delay as the pump out machine wasn't working. At the last minute this morning we were told it had finally bit the dust in a rather messy way, so we never did get our pump out. It's not a big deal, as we weren't desperate for one. We just would have liked to flush it out after Chris did all the improvements to our pumps and hoses.
Two friends helped us off with our lines, and we backed out of our slip and into the channel. We remembered just after leaving to turn our instruments on and the depth meter wasn't working!! It worked perfectly when we checked all our systems yesterday. We really didn't want to have to go back again, so we carried on without it. It is probably a piece of muck that got dislodged after our long stop, and we can clean it later.
We went south via Cumberland Island, which has wild horses and ruins of past grandeur on it, and is only accessible by boat.I saw a couple of large sea turtles. This is an area close to several of their protected nesting grounds. The weather was good, so we could go "outside" and pump our holding tank out the requisite distance from land. If it had been wild, we could have taken a slightly longer route through narrow rivers and streams, but not been able to pump out.
We passed by St.Marys, which has a submarine base. There are huge long "hangars" where I guess they build them. We had trouble with our route, as the one we had charted and loaded into our GPS didn't match up with the paper chart and the marker numbers. It turned out that our paper chart for this area is a little out of date (Chris only bought it a year and a half ago!) and the numbers on the buoys had changed. We nearly ended up going down the wrong river!
We passed Fernandina Beach (I guess the pretty side must face the ocean) and anchored south of it, in Alligator Creek. Chris got up the nerve to dive the transponder for our depth meter (located on the bottom of the keel) and I stood guard with a boat hook in case an alligator got hungry.
We didn't see any alligators and Chris didn't find any muck on the transponder, so our depth meter still isn't working.