There is water everywhere and I don’t like water! There used to be a place where Zoë and I could get off this thing and run around, but now it’s just water and I don’t like water.

It’s nice in the morning and evening when Mum and Ole Kev are here and we can go out on the deck of this thing. There’s lots to look at—people are running, biking, and walking, but there are no bugs to catch!

The other day Ole Kev got out a long thing that looked like it would be fun to play with, but instead of playing with us, he threw it in the water, so we didn’t get to play.

And now they filled up my sleeping area with big things so I only have a tiny area to sleep. I can’t stretch out anymore.

Is it time to go home yet?

Well, time seems to just get by really quickly! We’ve been here in Fort Lauderdale for a couple of weeks and I’ve been a bad blogger.

We’ve just been in the business of living… at the beach!

There is a pretty efficient bus system here as well as a $1 trolley ride, which we’ve used several times. Kevin’s phone died, so we went to the mall to get a new one, which was fortuitous for me as my glasses were scratched so I got a new set of lenses, as well.

Getting around without a car pretty much sucks, so we got folding bikes. Each weighs only 27 pounds so I can hand them down from the boat to Kevin in the dinghy and they fit in the aft berth nicely for storage. Of course, Bella had claimed this area as her own room and now she has virtually no place to stretch out there.

We needed groceries, so took the dinghy down to 15th Street, where there’s a restaurant that allows you to dock for $10 and then discounts any meal you have by $10. It’s about a two-block walk to the nearest Publix (grocery store). There’s a Winn Dixie closer, but their produce leaves a lot to be desired. We load up our backpacks with the groceries and you can see we have a nice wine carrier wheelie-bag.

Then we needed cat food, so rode about four miles to the pet store, loaded up our backpacks and rode the four miles back to the boat.

Yesterday, we finally got out my inflatable paddleboard and found that we didn’t have the right fitting for the pump. So, off we rode to West Marine, about 5 miles each way. These rides are not easy. They are on city streets with a lot of traffic, so I’m a bit of a nervous rider. And it’s really hot and humid here, so the rides are quite sweat inducing! It feels really good to hop into the ocean after one of these rides!

We keep meaning to leave and head to the Keys, but…maybe tomorrow.

We had our friends, Tom and Kellie of s/v Perfect Day, coming to visit us and get away from the crappy New England extended winter so we moved up to the Bahia Mar Yachting Center. Sound fancy? It is! The have about 500 slips and only 20 or 30 are for boats as “small” as ours. This place has so many mega-yachts docked that it is shocking to consider the amount of money involved! I’d feel comfortable saying that there was at least a billion dollars worth of boats there. Really.

But the place has a nice pool area and it’s a very short walk to the beach and restaurants, so it made sense to stay for the visit. We rented a car for a day so that we could go to the market and get groceries and do some other running around on Friday. Saturday, we cleaned the boat thoroughly inside and out and greeted our friend in the evening.

We had a great visit and spent time at both the beach and the pool, eating in the fun beach restaurants, and of course, there were a few cocktails…

But all visits come to an end and they went home on April 1st. We were sorry to see them go and look forward to more visits in the future.

We hauled up the anchor bright and early and headed for open ocean! It was so nice to be out three miles from shore with virtually no traffic and absolutely no bridges! The water was the most beautiful blue.

We had a nice sail down the coast between Lake Worth and Fort Lauderdale. Then we got into Fort Lauderdale and it was a mad house! There were boats going a hundred miles an hour and every which way. A Pilot boat in the entrance channel tried to run us over to the shore. Seriously. He was making room for a big cargo ship to leave port and thought that we were to close to the middle of the channel. We weren't and there was a boat under sail off to our starboard.

Then we had to have the 17th Street Bridge opened. The operator came on the radio and said that we could have made it without an opening. I wonder how he'd feel about running his home under a bridge. Our mast is 57' in height and we have a 3' antenna above that. That's 60' by my reckoning. The boards on the bridge said we had 57' of clearance. Whatever. The bridge guys in northern Florida are reputed to be friendlier than those in the south and this one certainly lived up to the reputation.

So our plan was to anchor in Lake Sylvia for a couple of nights, but we got to the anchorage and it was chock-a-block full of boats. Back up plan time. I had called the Las Olas marina earlier in the day and they had open moorings. So up the river we went.

We've been to Ft. Lauderdale many times but not this way, so I had no idea exactly how this marina was laid out. The marina is on the east side of the river, but the mooring field is on the west, which is not laid out in any of the guides. It also has an opening bridge between the two. So I called for an opening (this guy was really nice) and we were waiting for it when we realized that the moorings we were looking for were right there to our left. I called the bridge again and cancelled the opening. The operator was thankful for the call as, I am sure, were all the motorists who would have had to wait for no apparent reason!

So we picked up yet another kind of mooring, but I had planned ahead between Lake Sylvia and the marina and had my lines set more efficiently for threading the needle (as I've come to call it). BUT, this kind of mooring has a little stub with the "needle" on it and I missed it the first time. Rats! Second time worked out fine.

I will say that this city marina probably has the best facilities so far--at least the laundry room, which has six washers and six dryers and an enormous folding table. The weird thing is that the cleaning staff does its thing in the restrooms/showers at 8:00 in the morning. Kind of an odd time, considering that would be a good time for cruisers to be getting up and showered...

We’re anchored in Lake Worth, which is in Palm Beach. Tomorrow we go “outside” and hit Ft. Lauderdale late in the day. We’ll be off the ICW (thankfully) and able to sail (yay!) Today we had EIGHT bridges that we had to have opened to get from Stuart to here and if we were to stay in the ICW, there would be 22 more to open between here and Ft. Lauderdale. No, thank you!

We had a bit of excitement last night after I finished posting photos and updates. Our poor Bella went for her first swim. Here’s how the whole thing went down:

As I said before, the kits would have 100% supervised dock time. Well, that means that you have to be out there and not sitting below. I thought it was raining and that that the cats were in the cockpit, where it’s fairly dry. Except it wasn’t raining and they left the boat. We realized it and each headed a different direction on the dock looking for the kits.

I heard Kevin whistle and started heading back to him, saw one cat run like she was on fire to our boat. About this time, I got close enough to him to hear that one of the cats was in the water. Now, I start running like I’m on fire but I went to our boat to get the net. Kevin was quietly shouting that I needed to be with the cat and he would get the rescue supplies.

Fortunately she was in the water about 15’ in front of our boat, but the tide was low and there was about 4’ of concrete and a 6” of oysters showing on the dock. That cat could not find a purchase and couldn’t have climbed the concrete face anyway. I was so scared that the oysters would rip up her paws and she was howling like bloody murder even as I tried to speak calmly to her.

It was probably only a minute or two, but it felt like an hour, before Kevin arrived with our big fishing net and spotlight. So Kevin dips the net and the cat started to swim away! She finally figured out that we were trying to help her and that she could stand on the net. That helped a lot and we had her on the dock.

Now, we have to rinse her off, as the river is a tidal river and briny. But we were planning to leave in the morning, so our hose was put away! Another hour (OK, two minutes) goes by and we were able to rinse her down with virtually no protest. I still had her in the net and held on that way until Kevin could get us a towel. We wrapped her up and got below so we could inspect her paws, which were not torn up.

So it turns out that both cats had boarded the motor yacht tied up in front of us. Kevin saw them in the cockpit and told them to get off and get to our boat, at which point, both cats went running forward on this boat. Zoë took the shortest route and safely made it to the dock. Poor Bell, though, went the long way and could not make the leap. I think if she’d been on a teak deck she might have made it, but on fiberglass, she probably just slid.

I think the most disturbing thing about the whole incident was Zoë’s response --she was growling and hissing at poor Bella immediately after and again this morning. I know that cats don’t have the same familial feelings that humans have, but it’s hard to think that when I remember those two as kittens all snuggled up with each other.

Things seem to be better between them now and all’s well that ends well.

March 18 - 23

We had been planning to get a lot of stuff done in Stuart but had it done in Fernandina Beach instead. I really wanted to see this place as we had planned, so while it's 8 miles WEST of the ICW, we came in anyway. On the way from Vero to here we saw the St. Lucie power plant. I took a few photos showing how we sailed right under the power lines from it to the mainland. It seems scary, but the lines are 85 - 90 feet above the surface of the water.

There were some challenging moments at the St. Lucie inlet; where there is a confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the St. Lucie River. There were wild currents and mucho shoaling. We only scraped the bottom once, thankfully. There were also about a million power boats returning from wherever they had been, speeding along and making massive wakes. Then there were the bridges. There are three within an 800 foot stretch, and one of them requires a radio request to the bridge operator to open it so we can get our 57' mast through it. We've called for many bridge openings, but this one was a 65' fixed bridge followed by a railroad bridge and then the bascule bridge all in a very short space. We were a bit trepidatious as there is really no room for maneuvering. It worked out fine and we docked at the Sunset Bay Marina.

This is a really nice marina with great facilities. There are plenty of places close by to walk to for shopping or eating out, which we are still doing WAY too much of. We took a bus to West Marine to get a few boat things. We took the marina bikes out a couple of times for Dunkin Donuts coffee (yay!) and actually grocery shopped (clearly not a full load of stuff, but enough to fit in the bikes' baskets and in a backpack.) Now we are looking at buying our own folding bikes because we find biking to be easier than hoofing it for 2.5 miles and, of course, we don't already have enough stuff on the boat...

The kitties have been enjoying dock-time so much that they thought they'd let a neighboring boat know their feelings on the subject. We only found this out when the lady came over and asked if Zoë was ours. Apparently, she (Zoë) boarded this boat and stuck her head in the open hatch and scared the heck out of this poor woman, who was watching a scary movie! Yikes. Well, dock-time is now 100% supervised time with these two hooligans.

I got a new bird for my life list here as well. It's a Little Blue Heron, and I have wanted to see one in the wild for about 20 years. Yay! (pic in ICW album)

Oh, there was a farmers' market Sunday and I really did try, but apparently I am no longer an assertive A-type, so people kept butting in front of me. I just gave up.

Spring came on like summer here and the temps were high 80s to low 90s. It finally broke today with a rain storm and now it's a mild 72. Very pleasant. So, tomorrow we head east then south to Lake Worth and after that to our fave--Ft. Lauderdale. More soon.

On, St Patrick's Day, we left Melbourne and made it to Vero Beach in the early afternoon. It was like driving a boat through New York City to get there! We had to make a sharp left turn off the ICW just before a bridge to get into the City Marina, and then navigate some pretty tight quarters to get to our mooring. Fortunately, this mooring actually had a line so I didn't need to thread the needle again.

This place is called Velcro Beach by cruisers, so I was pretty interested in seeing what makes people stay. I don't really get it. It's pretty but buggy (some pics in the ICW album). The showers were not as good as other municipal marinas. The facility is OK, but not OK enough for us to make it our seasonal home port. We walked for more than a mile to get to the local watering hole...

We dropped the mooring at first light and headed to Stuart...

Our Waterway Guide tells about issues with shoaling, currents, and anchorages, so we are avid users of this book. In it we found a place to anchor in Melbourne. So we chugged on down the ICW and found the place. I like to scout things with binoculars before heading in, as a 40’ sailboat is not very maneuverable! So this time, I look out at this “anchorage” and all I see is a cluster of houses and a few boats in it, and those boats appear to be on mooring balls, which means we really can’t go there. It kind of looked like a cul de sac on the water. No way were we getting anywhere near this thing! I took the wheel and let Kevin see it for himself. He agreed with me.

Fortunately, we also rely on an app called Active Captain, which has input from cruisers about shoaling and currents and anchorages. So we found an anchorage across the river and happily dropped the hook. On shore I could see a cluster of festive looking red umbrellas, so we got cleaned up and launched the dinghy for a little shore time at a place called Squid Lips. If Al Z is reading, this, know that we did think of you while we were here!

We ate and had a couple of cold adult beverages. Very relaxing.

After a couple nights in New Smyrna, we moved on south to Titusville, which is close to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. Here, we were again at the city marina but on a mooring this time, so it was nice and cool.

We needed groceries so walked 2.6 miles to the market and took a cab back to the boat.

The couple with the Maine Coon cats also pulled into the moorings, so we took the dinghy over to their boat and visited for a while.

We also ran into a couple we had met back in Brunswick here, though we didn't really get a chance to catch up.

This mooring was even harder to deal with than some of the others I may have mentioned before. I've added a photo of it above. Essentially the mooring pennant was thicker and less pliable than most, so when I tried to grab it with the boat hook, I came up empty. We were using our nifty headsets during this operation, so I was able to get Kevin to reverse the boat so I could try again. After the second try, I figured out that I needed to grab the pennant by hooking the loop on the end of it. I got it and threaded my line through it and we were secure. We had no arguments and the headsets really are marriage savers, as advertised!

After a fairly short day on the ICW, we stopped at the New Smyrna Beach City Marina. Florida towns have been smart about developing these municipal marinas and they are clean, well-maintained facilities with very reasonable prices. The cruising guide we are using often cites that there will be "attractive homes" along a stretch of the ICW, and there were plenty of them here. (I've put some photos in the ICW album)

In this case we were on a dock, which is not our preference due to proximity to other boats and lack of breeze to keep the boat cool. But, we stayed a couple of nights and got the boat cleaned, took on water, and allowed the cats to run the docks at night.

The people next to us also had two cats, but they had not ventured off the boat until they saw ours out and enjoying life. Now, these cats were Maine Coon cats and twice the size of Zoë and Bella, so I was concerned about them "meeting" each other. Fortunately, there were no events.

There was also a juvenile owl that was hanging out on a boat nearby all day. I thought it might be having some sort of problem, but it flew off to another boat later in the day. We thought it had found a nice little mouse to eat when we saw something drop below it, but closer inspection indicated that owl poop is quite large! Sorry to get scatological, but this was a mouse sized turd.

This part of Florida is rife with what are called spoil islands, which I think are just sand bars that develop with the changing tides and keep on developing until they support plant life (probably mangroves). Once they are established, birds start using them as rookeries, so we got to see lots of Pelicans and Great Egrets along the way and there was one just off our stern in this marina.

Being on the ICW, we rarely see the ocean, as the whole thing is just a bunch of connected rivers that run somewhat parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. But the town's name is New Smyrna BEACH, so we started walking east. And we walked and walked and walked. I believe that the total round trip was more than five miles. But, it was all worth it. The waves were big and crashing!

There is a weekly farmers market in town on Saturday morning and I had every intention of going to it to pick up some fresh produce. But, alas, the skipper wanted to beat it as soon as the sun was up Saturday morning, so I had to give it a miss. Maybe next time...