The crews of Braveheart, Mystic Moon and Sea Star had a wonderful dinner in town and stopped to play pool at a local watering hole before returning to our boats for the evening. In the morning we met at famous Pepe's for breakfast--so in between the nine hour days of work on Sea Star we had fun.
Key West was not very busy in December but I could see the attraction when the weather was better in the outlying islands and reefs. Everybody has a boat, or charters a boat for sailing, fishing, diving and zooming around.
After our boat was ready and tested, Dan and I moved out of the expensive marina and picked up a town mooring. Bad idea! It was windy and the moorings were on short lines. They did not provide a bridle for your boat and there did not seem to be a way to slip a line from the boat through the tiny loop at the top of the mooring ball. Each time I tried something dreadful happened; first I bent the brand new boatpole and dropped it into the water(luckily it floats a bit and we got it back), then I lost the old boatpole as it was pulled out of my hands as I tried to capture the mooring ball-- finally a nice man, a cruiser, arrived through the surf in hid tiny dinghy and put the line through the loop for us.
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The next day we left the mooring field, without paying as noboby came out to us and we weren't going to put the dinghy down, thinking we would meet uo with Jimmy and Donna on Blue Water Cat in Marathon, Florida- one of the anchorages in the Keys.
Conditions were right to keep on going rather than stop, to beat an approaching cold front. We were quite anxious by now to arrive at Titusville, some 350 miles away. We sailed the Hawk Channel, avoiding the many crab pots during the day and just hoping to miss them at night as we moved along for all day and night. By 2:00AM we were crossing Governer's Cut where the big guys play.
We were surrounded by cruise ships, tankers, and all manner of boats wating to go into Miami. Sometime in the afternoon we were approaching our goal; the Lake Worth Inlet where we had crossed to the Bahamas from on Thanksgiving of 2008, our first year cruising. Our arrival at the inlet was just in time. The front had arrived, roiling the sea and the winds were increasing as we passed through that narrow cut and into the much calmer water within.
The anchorage in Fort Worth was fine for us, but others had run aground getting in there. Tow Boat US basically was sitting in the anchorage entrance and just waiting like a vulture. We were able to get some sleep before starting off again at 6:00AM. Dan had decided that the rest of the trip would be "on the inside" meaning in the Intracoastal Waterway. The weather was just too cold and windy for another day in the Atlantic.
In the Intracoastal there is always a lot to watch out for so it isn't relaxing at all. We knew we would have to go under many bridges per day and that movement had to be timed to the bridge's schedule. Our mast is 63 1/2 feet and the most clearance you get is 64 feet on the fixed bridges. Some areas of the ICW are shallow, or the waters are contained in a channel and a passing motorboat might "wake" you with a tidal wave sized plume of water, and it was Saturday and many boaters were out. Oh, and did I say it was cold? The temps went into the 40's at night.
One full, long day mostly hand steering from 6:00AM to 6:30PM brought us to Vero Beach Mooring Field, where we rafted up as required with another boat. Jim was a new cruiser but he had the idea. As we tied up to his mooring he asked if we wanted some Jerk Chicken! Totally yummy. We had a few beers with him and collapsed, waking to start out again at daylight.
The ICW can be lovely. There is wilderness, some of the lovliest homes in Florida, animals, birds, Manatee if you are lucky and many many red and green markers to go between in the dredged channel. The trip would have been more enjoyable had the temperature been warmer. Dan who was driving couldn't get or stay warm. Check out his pictures wearing everything we had on board.
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By dark we were still pushing on toward Titusville. We went through the last two bridges in the pitch dark and anchored outside the marina for the night. There were as many as twenty cruising boats in the anchorage and it was soo cold!
That night as we were anchoring there was a huge noise and we were thrilled to watch a rocket take off from the Space Center and shoot brilliantly into the darkness. We slept well knowing we we basically there and could begin to plan to drive home after we picked up our new car waiting in Tampa. We worried a bit about Patti and Gary who left the Rio a week after we did. Their weather was really rotton and they were heading to Titusville, too. We had left Braveheart in Key West at the marina for the military and Mystic was preparing to leave their boat for Christmas, too.
In the morning we tied Sea Star to her new home and prepared to be landlubbers for awhile.
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