Getting to Melbourne
13 November 2013 | New Smyrna Beach, Florida
Donna

The picture above is for my granddaughter Emilia. She never ever reads my blog but it’s a cool picture anyhow. Emilia loves ducks. If you talk to her, please don’t mention that these are American Coots, not actually ducks. Apparently, they like travelling in groups. I saw them floating together on our way past Daytona Beach yesterday.
Early in the month we decided we could make it to Melbourne by November 15th. That is when the Seven Seas Cruising Association, our cruising club, is having another Gam. $165 in pre-registration and food charges says we are going to make it, but it’s not going to be easy. We could have made some choices in the past week that would have made it easier for us, but we didn’t. The real complication is that today is outrageously windy and smart cruisers are staying put. We decided to be smart this time so we, also, are staying put.
We left the mooring field in St. Augustine before sunrise yesterday morning. It’s tough enough driving a forty foot boat through a mooring field in the daytime, in the dark it’s kind of scary. I managed to make it through without hitting anything though and after that it was easy going until the sun came out. A couple of hours later four boats that had also been moored in St. Augustine near us caught up to us and eventually passed us. All five of us went through one of the opening bridges together, then the three fastest got far ahead. We were a little worried that they would be heading for the same anchorage we were heading for. In heavy winds you don’t want a lot of boats around you because then you have to worry about them dragging their anchor and banging into you. Turns out that we didn’t have to worry. All four of the boats were heading into marinas hours before we were getting to our destination. We think a lot of people don’t trust their anchoring skills and prefer to be in a marina when it is so windy. Not us, we think it’s more difficult in a marina, we would rather anchor.
Because it was going to take twenty hours to get to Melbourne, and now we only had two days of travel time, we had to go ten hours on Tuesday. It was a long day, and I have a bit of a cold, so we were totally wiped out when we got here. We did spend half the day in bed today though. I’m not going to complain about that! Tomorrow is another ten hour day. We are going to leave long before sunrise and hope for an easy day. Hopefully the winds will calm down for us. So far the maximum wind speed has been 37.3 knots. It’s still blowing in the 20-25 knot range but we haven’t budged an inch!