Day 263 to 270:

More routine days...seven or eight hours of powering into light NE breezes. We stay at Melbourne Harbor then on to the Titusville Municipal Marina. The guy on the boat next to us in Titusville was hosing down his boat and we see a manatee on his back with his mouth open getting what little fresh water he could. Soon he is joined by 2, 3, then many others trying to get water. Amazing, and our first manatee siting! While they have gotten a bad rap from the powerboat people who dislike having to slow down in the many posted no wake manatee zones, these giant creatures are just big gentle, lumbering mammals not bothering anyone. I am now a manatee fan.

The next day another very calm and routine motoring trip up the Indian River and across through Haulover Cut to Mosquito Lagoon (remote, shallow and very beautiful) and then up the North Indian River through Edgewater and into the New Smyrna Beach Marina. I jump in a cab and head to a Publix for some supplies and S stays with the boat doing some boat chores and some work.

Next day we are up and through the Ponce Inlet/ICW intersection (which was way shallow water on our way down). We actually take our time getting there, waiting for the tide to come in some--just above half. Get through with no problem and decide to go into Daytona for just one night...or perhaps longer if this big low pressure area SE of Georgia starts to develop as our weather guru is concerned that it might. The Halifax Harbor Marina in Daytona is clean and well-run and has cement floating docks. We like it here.

As S is refueling with his Jerry jugs, who do we see coming in to the slip just across from us but Wink and Cindy Merrill aboard Saltaire, our friends from Newport and Hope Town! Of all the docks in all the marinas.....what are the chances of this? We go over to Saltaire for cocktails and to watch the Kentucky Derby in their air-conditioned saloon (it is hot) and then head out to a great local place for pizza. Fun to see the Merrills again. They are on their way to St. Augustine in the AM, then on their way to Thunderbolt (south of Savannah) to have the boat hauled to do some major mechanical and electrical improvements for the boat, then home by car to Newport.

Well, it's a good thing that we like it here...It's going to be a while. This storm is now officially Tropical Storm Andrea (in MAY!! give us a break!) 100 miles NE of us and very undecided about where she is headed. Winds are 40-45 in squally areas and we really cannot move until this gets resolved. On top of that we have Florida wildfires just inland of Daytona and to the NW of us that has filled the air with a cloudy, acrid smoke. This is really weird weather.

We rent a car and spend an afternoon at the Kennedy Space Center and do a great up-close-and-personal tour of the place. It is really cool, and we get out to the launch pads and see the big mobile platform called "the crawler" that carries the rockets from the assembly building to the launch pads some three miles away. The Crawler is actually moving along its path right next to our tour bus. The tour guide says that this is an unusual thing to see...it is positively enormous. All in all, this is one pretty impressive place and surrounded by the huge 140,000 acre Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. We see our first alligator and a ton of beautiful birdlife driving from tour stop to tour stop. According to NASA, the high-tech operations of the space program do not seem to bother the wildlife. The only fatalities caused by the launches are the minnows in the shallow water adjacent to the launch pads. For the rest of the refuge "residents", life returns to normal after a blast-off.

Daytona itself is a transient sort of place. Of course the speedway is here, the place is overrun with springbreakers in March/April; the Harley crowd arrives for Bike Week in March, etc. Daytona's 23 miles of beach were once a proving ground for automobile engines in the early 1900's. Automobile pioneers like Louis Chevrolet and Henry Ford found the hard-packed sand, gentle slope and wide expanse of beach to be the perfect venue for auto racing.

Vero to Daytona Pix in the corresponding album.