12/20/14
Vero Beach FL, Vero Beach Municipal Marina, ICW
Position: 27 39.686N, 80 22.319W
Posted by Bill

The weather forecast showed rain and storms in northern Florida this weekend, but further south was going to be ok until Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so we have been driving hard to get south of the weather trough. We made it. Yesterday was in the 70s with lows in the low 60s and it was sunny. Today was in the 80s and sunny. We were actually hot for the first time in awhile, definitely shorts and T-shirts. To us, this is the holy grail. When people we met along the way asked us where we were headed we told them, somewhere warm.

We made to Vero Beach. They have a great mooring field in an area that caters to cruisers. The cruising community calls it “Velcro Beach” because it is so convenient to the beach, marine stores, grocery stores, etc… The weather is supposed to be the same from here to Miami through Christmas so we figured this was a good place to spend the holidays.

We got up at sunrise today to get an early start.

The first 3/4s of the 52 mile trip was pretty boring again, except that it was the weekend. The weekend on the ICW brings out the power boaters and lots of wake and boat traffic. One stretch of the ICW was almost as bad as Lake Erie on a weekend! Then we started seeing more and more really nice houses:


And more derelict boats:

And then this chick on … I don’t know what to call this. Some kind of water jet shoes. She was doing flips and everything. Pretty amazing.

We arrived at the mooring field and I was exhausted from the last 10 days of passage. Here is our view from the mooring.

We also caught up to our old/new friends from Paperbird. It was good to see them again. They are also spending Christmas here. Tomorrow we will check out the area and maybe spend some time at the beach. It is only a 20 minute walk.