We had a very short motor today and we may have another shortie tomorrow depending on decision to be made. Today we only had a 3 hour steam from Eau Gallie to Cocoa anchorage where our friends Jim and Sharleen are living aboard their boat sloop Midpoint. The anchor windlass behaved very well indeed after the scare she gave us in Melbourne and the bottom is soft mud so we are anticipating good holding. I am a little nervous about one thing. Directly behind us in our lee are some power cables that stretch across the ICW from the mainland to Merritt Island. Fortunately, the holding seems to be really good which is fortunate as the wind is really piping up. We went over to Midpoint and picked up Sharleen to go into town and see the historical part of Cocoa. Incidentally, it appears that I have been posting the name of this place incorrectly. Cocoa instead of Coco. The historical part of Cocoa is a really interesting town with loads of restaurants and art galleries to visit. Old Susie worked very well for us but there were whitecaps in the anchorage so the trip back to Nelleke in our sadly overloaded boat from the shore was very wet and quite slow. We are going to have Jim and Sharleen over for dinner but since he is rowing an Avon inflatable I will be going over to give him a ride and tow his dingy over to Nelleke.

The anchorage is quite large with space for lots of boats. The only possible fly in the ointment is that there is a fellow here who has named himself the local harbour master and tries to tell everyone what to do and where to do it. My understanding is that he has no legal status as harbourmaster but he goes out into the anchorage and drops moorings that he lets out to people who want to stay in Cocoa tax free and visit the local bars. His "moorings" are the size of crab pot balls which is what I thought they were when I saw them.

Oh well.

We spent the afternoon entertaining and being entertained by Sharleen. A lot of fun and we got to know her much better. Jim was working and wasn't able to arrive until about 1700. When he was able to arrive, poor working stiff, we had a great time getting caught up, finding some Intel about the ICW ahead of us and of some of the local anchoring politics. They are a nice couple and have always been very nice and hospitable to us. I showed off my culinary skills with the low down dirty cheater's recipe for pasta sauce out of my cookbook Son of a Sea Cook and greatly over indulged wit wine and spirits.

Barbara asked me why we had two heads aboard and for the life of me I couldn't come up with a sensible answer. She suggested that it would make more sense to take out the head and convert it into a hanging wet locker and toilet. I can't help but agree.

We have been giving some thought to what to do tomorrow. Our original plan had been to head out to the nice little anchorage that we know about where the Banana River intersects with the Canaveral Barge Canal which would be a one hour trip tomorrow, but that does seem to be a waste of a day. So, we can either skip the anchorage and head on out to make the trip or we could keep on in the ICW to New Smyrna Beach, a distance of 50 miles, and go out the inlet there instead. We'll see which we pick tomorrow. The big thing is the weather forecasts which are calling for thunderstorms and strong winds tomorrow.