Nov 29 – Dec 1
We left Vero in the rain after filling up on water and gas for the dinghy and headed out along the ICW. It felt good to be underway again.
We stayed in Hobe Sound that night, Boca Ratton the next night and Ft. Lauderdale on Friday. We are hoping to cross over the Gulf Stream on Saturday or Sunday when there is a 2 day “weather window”. Today, the waves on the Gulf Stream are 10 feet but on Saturday and Sunday, they are forecasted to be only 3 feet. I am sure we will be in 10 ft waves soon enough. We are going to go looking for them.
Nov 19 -28
We left Coco and headed for Vero Beach, Florida. The anchorage at Vero is very protected from all wind directions which makes it a favourite location for many cruisers while they do their final provisioning before heading across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. You can’t anchor in Vero since the city decided they could cram a lot more boats in if they put in mooring balls and rafted (tied) boats together 3 to a ball. The ball only costs $10/day and for an extra $1.07 you can use their showers so we decided “what the heck”. There were over 50 mooring balls with 3 boats each. Lap Cat from Hamilton arrived a week ago so we rafted to them. (It came in handy later when I had to borrow an egg when I was in the middle of baking brownies).
When we went to shore, we tied up our dinghy at the dingy dock as usual only in Vero there were sometimes a hundred dinghies tied up to a hundred foot dinghy dock. You had to leave your painter (dinghy rope) 20 ft long so that people could push and pull the dinghies sideways and forward and backward like one of those wooden puzzles they always had on Survivor to get in and off the dock.
We took the bus many times to the grocery store and West Marine to stock up on everything we might not be able to find or will be too expensive in the Bahamas. We stuffed it into every cabinet and cubby hole we could find. We picked up a second lap top computer for back up (we use it for our electronic charts and navigation software).
On Thanksgiving Day, there was a pot luck dinner at the hall beside the marina and about 200 cruisers showed up with all the traditional stuff: turkey, green bean casserole, stuffing, yams, etc. and enough pumpkin pie to sink a battleship. We had missed the Canadian Thanksgiving so it was nice to catch up on any calories we might have been behind.
On the weekend, we rented a car and drove across to the West Coast of Florida to visit our friends Tim and Leslie. We met Tim and Leslie’s at the marina in Hamilton this summer and they spend their winters in Florida. It was really great to see them again. They have a beautiful home right on the golf course so it was great to play 9 holes and remind ourselves why we sail instead of golf professionally.
As we drove back across the state, we weren’t surprised to see miles and miles of orange groves but we were surprised at the number of cattle ranches. We saw thousands of cattle that looked like the skinny hump back kind they have in Mexico. They didn’t look like very good eating if you ask me.
We celebrated Steve’s 43rd birthday on the 27th with a nice steak dinner with our friend Ken from Lap Cat.
Nov 16 -18
We spent another 4 days in Cocoa Beach. The weather cleared up sooner than expected and our life raft arrived all nice and shiny so all in all we had 3 nice days. We decided to buy a Honda 2000 gas generator since they were on sale at the hardware store for $999.00. The gas generator is better for charging the boat batteries since running the diesel engine once a day to charge the batteries is annoyingly loud and more wear and tear on the engine. The Honda generator is really quiet and while you are charging the batteries, you can also plug in an AC tool right into it which is more efficient than using the inverter which is great because now we are going to have to use those tools to build a deck box to secure the generator on deck since they tend to get stolen.
Nov 15
The weather in Cocoa was getting windy and the weather station said that it was going to get a lot worse. We thought we might be stuck on the boat for a couple days so I decided to dinghy to shore to do our laundry which had gotten out of control. The wind was blowing onto the dinghy dock and the waves were crashing all the dinghies and their motors up against the dock. I tied the dinghy and retied the dinghy for 20 minutes, trying to make sure it would still be there when I got back after 2 hours in the Laundromat. I finally decided it wasn’t worth the risk and got back into my dinghy with my huge bag of laundry and went back to the boat. This time I was going against the wind so the waves were spraying on the dinghy and soaking me and my laundry. I should have just added some soap to the bag and dragged it overboard and called it clean, but then drying would have been a problem.
We left Vero in the rain after filling up on water and gas for the dinghy and headed out along the ICW. It felt good to be underway again.
We stayed in Hobe Sound that night, Boca Ratton the next night and Ft. Lauderdale on Friday. We are hoping to cross over the Gulf Stream on Saturday or Sunday when there is a 2 day “weather window”. Today, the waves on the Gulf Stream are 10 feet but on Saturday and Sunday, they are forecasted to be only 3 feet. I am sure we will be in 10 ft waves soon enough. We are going to go looking for them.
Nov 19 -28
We left Coco and headed for Vero Beach, Florida. The anchorage at Vero is very protected from all wind directions which makes it a favourite location for many cruisers while they do their final provisioning before heading across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. You can’t anchor in Vero since the city decided they could cram a lot more boats in if they put in mooring balls and rafted (tied) boats together 3 to a ball. The ball only costs $10/day and for an extra $1.07 you can use their showers so we decided “what the heck”. There were over 50 mooring balls with 3 boats each. Lap Cat from Hamilton arrived a week ago so we rafted to them. (It came in handy later when I had to borrow an egg when I was in the middle of baking brownies).
When we went to shore, we tied up our dinghy at the dingy dock as usual only in Vero there were sometimes a hundred dinghies tied up to a hundred foot dinghy dock. You had to leave your painter (dinghy rope) 20 ft long so that people could push and pull the dinghies sideways and forward and backward like one of those wooden puzzles they always had on Survivor to get in and off the dock.
We took the bus many times to the grocery store and West Marine to stock up on everything we might not be able to find or will be too expensive in the Bahamas. We stuffed it into every cabinet and cubby hole we could find. We picked up a second lap top computer for back up (we use it for our electronic charts and navigation software).
On Thanksgiving Day, there was a pot luck dinner at the hall beside the marina and about 200 cruisers showed up with all the traditional stuff: turkey, green bean casserole, stuffing, yams, etc. and enough pumpkin pie to sink a battleship. We had missed the Canadian Thanksgiving so it was nice to catch up on any calories we might have been behind.
On the weekend, we rented a car and drove across to the West Coast of Florida to visit our friends Tim and Leslie. We met Tim and Leslie’s at the marina in Hamilton this summer and they spend their winters in Florida. It was really great to see them again. They have a beautiful home right on the golf course so it was great to play 9 holes and remind ourselves why we sail instead of golf professionally.
As we drove back across the state, we weren’t surprised to see miles and miles of orange groves but we were surprised at the number of cattle ranches. We saw thousands of cattle that looked like the skinny hump back kind they have in Mexico. They didn’t look like very good eating if you ask me.
We celebrated Steve’s 43rd birthday on the 27th with a nice steak dinner with our friend Ken from Lap Cat.
Nov 16 -18
We spent another 4 days in Cocoa Beach. The weather cleared up sooner than expected and our life raft arrived all nice and shiny so all in all we had 3 nice days. We decided to buy a Honda 2000 gas generator since they were on sale at the hardware store for $999.00. The gas generator is better for charging the boat batteries since running the diesel engine once a day to charge the batteries is annoyingly loud and more wear and tear on the engine. The Honda generator is really quiet and while you are charging the batteries, you can also plug in an AC tool right into it which is more efficient than using the inverter which is great because now we are going to have to use those tools to build a deck box to secure the generator on deck since they tend to get stolen.
Nov 15
The weather in Cocoa was getting windy and the weather station said that it was going to get a lot worse. We thought we might be stuck on the boat for a couple days so I decided to dinghy to shore to do our laundry which had gotten out of control. The wind was blowing onto the dinghy dock and the waves were crashing all the dinghies and their motors up against the dock. I tied the dinghy and retied the dinghy for 20 minutes, trying to make sure it would still be there when I got back after 2 hours in the Laundromat. I finally decided it wasn’t worth the risk and got back into my dinghy with my huge bag of laundry and went back to the boat. This time I was going against the wind so the waves were spraying on the dinghy and soaking me and my laundry. I should have just added some soap to the bag and dragged it overboard and called it clean, but then drying would have been a problem.
posted by tobogganride at 10:29 AM
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