Originally posted at www.svsweetescape.com
We have done it! We have finally outrun winter. The multiple layers of clothing are starting to come off. The past few days have been filled with sunny skies and temperatures in the 70’s, a lot different than what we were dealing with just a little over a week ago. We are hopeful that as we make our way towards South Florida the weather will continue to improve.
A word of encouragement to those cruisers still far north of us and dealing with tough conditions - keep coming south, there is relief in the promised land.
We stayed at St. Augustine for three nights. On Saturday we slipped our mooring and after a stop for fuel and other needs we pointed Sweet Escape south headed for Daytona Beach where we spent a pleasant night in an anchorage just off the ICW. We had some trouble getting into this anchorage though. Our cruising guide’s instructions didn’t work. Each time we would make an approach following those directions we found water too shallow to get through and would have to back out. Seeing our plight, another cruiser - Wind Seeker, a boat that was already in the anchorage called us on the VHF with instructions on how to get in. After that we had no problem. We were able to get into the anchorage and never saw less than 11 feet of water. So much for cruising guides.
Sunday morning we weighed anchor and continued south traveling 55 miles to Titusville where we anchored again just off the ICW and in the shadow of the NASA complex. From the waterway you can see the Vehicle Assembly Building where the rockets are assembled for flight. Just north of our anchorage we passed through the NASA railroad bridge, an unattended bridge that is open unless a train is coming through. This is the rail line that NASA uses for transporting large rocket components that are then assembled at the Kennedy Space Center in the aforementioned VAB. Interesting to imagine what all has made the trip across that rail line.
This part of the ICW is a wide expanse of water between the mainland and Florida’s barrier islands. For the most part the cruising is easy, the water is deep enough in most places and the tides here are no more than a foot at the most which makes getting under most fixed bridges easy.
The anchorages here are really not anchorages in the way we think of them up north. Here you simply find an area of suitably deep enough water and pull over out of the channel. They are completely unprotected from wind and wave. We have been fortunate to have had calm winds the past couple of nights. These anchorages could get nasty and be really uncomfortable in a wind storm.
There is a lot of wild life in this area of the ICW. Yesterday we saw something that neither of us had ever seen before - pink flamingos in the wild. Two groups of flamingos flew by us and we were able to get some photos from a distance. Brian was thinking how embarrassing it must be to be a male pink flamingo, having all the other male birds always making fun of you.
This morning, shortly after we got underway we had a visitor in the form of a dolphin that swam with us for about five minutes. We were able to get some video that we posted to YouTube and which is available at right.
Dolphins are interesting animals. When they swim with you alongside the boat they always swim alongside where you are on the boat as if they want to see you and want you to see them. Sweet Escape is 44 feet long but this dolphin swam alongside the cockpit at the back of the boat where we were. They seem to seek out that interaction with the people not just the boat.
We anchored for the night at Cape Malabar about 20 miles north of Vero Beach. Again we are anchored in the middle of the Indian River and again we’re thankful that the winds and waves are calm.
Tomorrow we will head for Vero Beach also known as Velcro Beach among cruisers because cruisers tend to stick there for a while. Velcro or not, we will stay just a couple days. We intend to pick up a mooring but we have heard that if they get busy the marina which runs the mooring field requires mandatory rafting. Essentially you find a boat that is already secured to the mooring and pull up next to it with fenders down and tie up to the other boat. We’re a little nervous about this since we’ve never done it before.
Patient readers will have to tune in to the next exciting installment of Travels Aboard the Good Ship Sweet Escape to find out if and how it all works out.
No comments:
Post a Comment