12/19/14
Cocoa Beach FL – ICW
Position: 28 20.925N, 80 43.152W
Posted by Bill

Well, yesterday I neglected to post a few pictures that I took with my phone, so here is an update:

In Daytona, we took a walk to the beach. This was on the south side of Daytona, much prettier than I remember the main drag being. You can’t drive on this part of the beach either.

Along the way we saw Frosty the Snowman-a-tee…lol

I love it when people have a warped sense of humor!

Today we departed our marina around 7:20 and followed a route through the Ponce de Leon inlet that the marina guys instructed me on. Based on the experience we had coming in to the marina the day before, I should have known that they aren’t the best at giving instructions, but I guess I am a slow learner. First, this inlet is known as a major shoal area and the published nautical charts are nowhere near accurate. The depths change daily and everything you read says to get “local knowledge”. Typically you get this from the marine towing companies or local marinas, so I trusted our guy. We set out as he instructed and within 20 minutes we ran hard aground, lurching to a halt. Fortunately it is all sand and all I needed to do was put it in reverse and move further away from the area they told me to avoid. They said “stay 150 feet off of the area that is marked by shoal buoys”, when in fact you needed to be more like 200 to 300 feet. Bad start to the day, but no one got hurt, so cool.

We had a long day, doing 51 nautical miles, one of our longest days without an overnight passage. This passage was pretty boring, with the most exciting stuff looking like this:

But we did have this lighthouse at the southern tip of Daytona:

And we saw the Cape Canaveral NASA launch site in the distance:

We saw lots of dolphins and I got a video on my phone of them by the boat, which I will post as soon as I can get it off of my phone. Plus, look at all of the birds….lots of poop….lots of poop.
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We are also seeing more and more derelict boats that have been abandoned or that are wrecked, and no one seems to try to clean them up.

Here is where we anchored in Cocoa Beach.

We took the dinghy ashore and checked out the town and the Cocoa Village area, which was pretty cool if you want to buy a bunch of stuff. They had an old hardware store that had everything you could imagine in it. I told the workers that I was glad I didn’t have to inventory this place…OMG!

Then we took the dinghy across the river to a place called Ms. Apples Crab Shack. You pick out what you want from a varied selection of fresh seafood and shellfish, and they will cook it for you, and you can eat it outside on the picnic tables. We chose lobsters…they were good!

Now we are planning where to hang for Christmas. It is looking like it might be Vero Beach. We should arrive tomorrow and will check it out before we commit. There is a weather front coming the day before Christmas Eve and running through Christmas Day, so we will want to be in a marina for that. Good news is…we are far enough south that the highs are consistently in the 70s and the lows are in the 60s. I ain’t gonna bitch about that! Vero is supposed to be a great place to hold up for a few days and we are weary from the long days we have had since we left Beaufort SC. We have been pushing hard, so we will enjoy a few days in one place.

By the way…alternator update…performing flawlessly for weeks. I don’t get it.

In closing…heard a good saying the other day in St Augustine. “5 knots is slow for a boat, but it is pretty fast for a house”. We loved it!