Monday 20 January 2020
941 statute miles to go as of this morning.

This has been a long, long, shivery cold day.

But let's start at the beginning shall we?!

First I have to say that I had some concerns last night. After setting the anchor and backing down on it pretty hard I felt we had a firm hook. But then the forecasted winds came up all right but from a different direction so I was worried at around three in the morning that the anchor might pop out. With the new wind direction it would have had us colliding with either the fellow who came in to anchor after us or the Dock behind him. Mercifully, it held. But that didn't stop me from not getting much sleep. This is an interesting anchorage. If you read the reviews on Active Captain you'll see that almost everyone likes and appreciates the spot, but then you get people who misread the chart and think there are cables here and one guy who went ashore on the Environmental Studies Dock to walk his dog and wondered why the police showed up. You're supposed to go to a small beach near the bridge. At least, that's where I used to go with Periwinkle and never had a problem.

Another sign that we are moving north is that this morning, amidst the cool winds, I put on long trousers. Today is chilly by comparison with temperatures from 17-20 degrees centigrade. Looks like we won't be sleeping on top of the sheets tonight.

Holy crap! I spent the day on the helm steering wearing a parka, a toque and a pair of gloves and we are in central Florida! The only benefit of this weather is that the yahoos are at home and not rushing about in their power boats. All through the day boats were passing us in the other direction, including the one that's in the photo on today's post.

We had a good 15-20 knots of wind on the nose consistently all day so we never made more than 5.5 knots. Still, by six in the evening we were on a mooring in the Titusville Municipal Marina. Kudos to Barb for her developing skills in picking up a mooring bridle. Interesting that none of the marina's here have moorings that have what we think of as bridles, namely a couple of lines with large loops at the end of them that you fish aboard and hook to your forward cleats. Here instead they provide one line with an inch and a half plastic eye at the end through which you are expected to put your own line.

Barb really pushed for getting here and picking up a mooring as she knew that I didn't get much sleep last night. She was right of course. This was the right thing to do and for $20 a night it's cheap insurance for a good nights sleep. Thanks Barb.

After stopping it didn’t take long for us to button up the boat and turn on the heaters. Thank heavens for propane heaters and one pound propane cylinders.

We travelled 66.4 miles today, almost twice our daily quota. We have 879 miles to go to Norfolk.