Finally Free of Vero Beach
05 December 2013 | Conch Bar, Jupiter, Florida
Donna
Although we enjoyed the visit, we finally managed to leave Vero Beach this morning. Our packages arrived yesterday afternoon! We got up early, took one last shower, walked to the beach to a restaurant for breakfast, and cast off the mooring line before 9:30am.
We wanted to get as far as we could go today so Bill found an anchorage we could arrive at around 5:00pm. It was a calm day and the sun was mostly shining. We spent two full weeks in Vero Beach. Battery power is always an issue when you aren’t moving the boat at all. We have a solar panel but it doesn’t help charge the batteries as much as it could, and it definitely doesn’t help when it is cloudy or rainy every day as it has been for most of the past two weeks. We have had to run our engine an hour or two every couple of days just to keep the batteries above the danger levels. We were happy that we would be motoring for about eight hours today so our batteries could get well charged. Unfortunately Bill discovered that the batteries are not charging well again. We had this problem in Maine this summer and we were lucky enough to know of a free dock with shore power we could use for a couple of days. Here in Southern Florida I don’t think they know the word free. We have found a marina in Lake Worth that we can get to tomorrow. They have a slip we can rent where we can hook up to shore power and equalize our batteries. It worked really well in Maine, let’s hope it works just as well in Florida. The marina is within walking distance of West Marine and I’m sure there will be a restaurant close by for breakfast!
On a good note today though, as we went past one of the inlets into the ocean where the water is usually a much nicer color, a couple of dolphins were swimming next to our boat. Bill managed to catch a good picture of them this time. You can really see the one dolphins’ blow hole in the picture above.