Provisioning with Friends
27 November 2018

We had a liesurely start to our Monday morning since we only had 14 miles to go to Cocoa Beach. We relaxed over morning coffee before hauling anchor and getting underway around 8:30 under warm sunny skies. Our plan is to stop and visit Bill and Cathy Bredt in Cocoa Beach for a couple of days and get a jump start on our provisioning for the Bahamas. 2Outrageous headed off to Eau Gallie for a few days and we will hook up with them further down the road. We're getting within range of our jump off point so it's important to be ready to go when a good weather window presents itself.
One of the recommended anchorages is near a local bait shop where they allow transients to tie up dinghies for the day. We arranged for Bill and Cathy to meet us there, so with shopping list in hand we headed ashore. The docks were great but the bait shop was like a step back in time with a truly local flavour. Imagine the old Chateau du Lac tavern with a dock where customers could arrive by boat, play pool, buy live bait and have a cold one, then this would be that place.
After a nice lunch overlooking Port Canaveral we were off to the grocery store where the first order was to buy lots of meat to freeze. We learned from our last trip the best thing to do is vacuum seal everything before freezing it for a better shelf life. So with full bags we headed back to the condo to divide up and seal everything. We had brought along our food saver making the process fast and simple, however, someone left the extra roll of bags on the boat so he had to go out and find more. Once all the work was done we relaxed and enjoyed the beautiful view of the ocean from the balcony before sitting down to a great meal.
We headed back to the boat around 9p.m. with a heavily loaded dinghy and settled in for the night. The wind has shifted so we may consider relocating south of the bridge and spend another day here. Bill and Cathy have been a great help and we'd like to hang out for a day before pushing on.
Today's picture was taken in St. Augustine of the gang waiting for their morning meal.