12/27/14
Peck Lake FL, ICW
Position: 27 39.459N, 80 22.216W
Posted by Bill

We got up fairly early today and filled our water tanks and fuel tanks, and pumped out the holding tank again…once again waste free! Then we motored down the ICW towards Stuart FL. Our original destination was a place called Manatee Pocket, near Port Salerno FL. We liked that destination because it had some really good restaurant reviews, and lots of places you could dinghy to with Tiki Bars. As we got close, the boat traffic on the ICW really picked up. There were dozens and dozens of power boats zooming at top speed all over the channel (which isn’t that wide) and it made for a hectic day with many bumps and rolls from the boat wakes. As we got into Manatee Pocket, the boat traffic increased and the water depths decreased. We got to the anchorage we targeted and it was crowded with too many boats, and the water depth was making us nervous. I have read that many cruisers don’t travel on the ICW in Florida on the weekends because the boat traffic is just too insane, and now I get it! We may opt for that as well in the future.

Here is what the ICW looked like most of the way:

And then there was this billboard…hope for Island Bound if we ever run out of money…lol!

Then we caught up to our new friends that we met in Vero Beach on Simple Life:


And of course, we saw lots of dolphins again:

We conjured up Simple Life on the marine radio to get their recommendation on an alternative anchorage since Manatee Pocket didn’t work out. They were going to a place south of there called Peck Lake. There is a thin strip of land between the anchorage and a beautiful beach on the Atlantic Ocean. We stopped in and dropped the hook. We didn’t launch the dinghy to go to the beach, but we can hear the waves crashing on the shore from our boat. It ended up that our friends on Paperbird were here. They left yesterday and we caught up to them yet again. Honestly…we are not stalking them.

I put our outdoor grill together. We bought it before we left but have never used it thus far. We didn’t use it today either but at least it is ready to go!

Tomorrow we will head to Lake Worth/West Palm Beach.

12/26/14
Vero Beach FL, ICW
Posted by Bill

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. As predicted, we ended up going to the cruisers potluck. They shut down the laundry room and laid out all of the food on the washers and dryers.

We all brought our own plates and utensils and what ever we wanted to drink. Then people went through the line and moved out to the picnic tables.

The food was really good and we got to meet some more people, including a couple that had an Island Packet 44 which is a little bigger than ours. They had a cute dog that looked like Fozzie Bear, and that dog can navigate her way around the boat like no other that we have seen. We had also admired their solar panels, so Forest and Susan invited us over for a look at how they were installed. It was very helpful and we got to know them a little better. We really liked them and hope to see them again. Forest gave me a boat card and said…”we have a house on the water in Rode Island…you are welcome to dock behind us and use our laundry and car…anytime”. Another example of the bond in the cruising community. It is just amazing. They have sailed all over the Caribbean…and Forest is 75 years old, but you would never know it.

Today, we took the bus and had lunch, then bought some more liquor. Then I changed the oil in the big boat. We were going to do laundry but settled on cocktails for the sunset, even though it was cloudy! Tomorrow we leave…but it is tough. Vero is a very easy place to hang out. We will definitely be back.

Here are a few shots of the beach area.

12/22/14
Vero Beach FL, ICW
Posted by Bill

This is day 2 after our arrival at Vero Beach City Marina. It has been in the 80s every day and in the 60s at night. We had a few sprinkles last night in the early morning but other than that it has been sunny and bright. This is not at all what we are used to for Christmas so it has been difficult to wrap our heads around the fact the Christmas is in 3 days.

Vero Beach is a really great place from a cruising perspective. The marina is very well protected from the weather from almost all sides. There is very little current and the tidal range is around 1 foot. They have 50 mooring balls and a hand full of docks/slips, and decent bathrooms and showers. The mooring prices are really cheap and the dockage prices are very reasonable for Florida. The beach is a 20 minute walk at most, and there are many choices for eating or drinking in the beach area near the marina. A 20 minute walk across the ICW bridge takes you to more places to eat and a few shopping alternatives, but if you walk another 10 minutes from there you have Publix, Fresh Market, a huge liquor store, a huge dive shop, and a West Marine. Better yet, there is a free bus service that stops in front of the marina that will take you to this shopping area in 5-10 minutes, and will allow you to connect to other bus routes that can get you to a mall, Super Walmart and the airport, just to mention a few. The same bus will also take you to the beach if you don’t want to walk. To top it off, the weather is pretty close to what it is in Miami and the Keys. For the time we have been here, the highs are the same but the lows are only in the 60s here, and in the 70s in the lower Keys.

This town is known as “Velcro Beach” to the cruising community, because it is easy to get really comfortable here and not want to go anywhere else. We have met several couples who are here for “the season”. I can see why as I don’t really care when we leave at this point.

The day we arrived, we relaxed and just soaked in the idea that we were not moving for a few days, and enjoyed the warm sunshine. Yesterday we walked to the beach:

It was a really nice beach…one neither Tricia or I have been to before. There is a lot of residential area along this beach and the commercial areas are well kept and have a touch of class, definitely not a run down beach town. We stopped at a beach bar called Waldos. We enjoyed some rum runners while listening to a really good live band. They reminded me a lot of Grand Funk Railroad. We mostly walked around the beach area near us to explore and get our bearings.

Today went like this: Dinghy ashore to get showers, back to the boat to have breakfast and charge the batteries for a bit, dinghy ashore to catch the bus, go shopping, catch the bus back to the marina, take the stuff we bought back to the boat in the dinghy, put everything away, charge the batteries the rest of the way, wax the cockpit while charging, clean the transom while charging, charge the iPod while charging, add another pennant to the mooring in anticipation of higher winds this week, dinghy to Mr Manatees restaurant across the ICW, dinghy back, write a blog.

While shopping, we scoped out the liquor store, Fresh Market and Publix to see who had the best prices on what. Then we went to West Marine and bought a jerry can for gas, and browsed through the dive shop to price what we need for the Bahamas. We brought back some groceries and the jerry can and will go back tomorrow for more groceries. The bus service is great, but it was amazing that it pretty much takes a day to go get groceries and put them away. During this whole process, we got to meet several more couples doing what we are doing, and we have been learning a lot from them. It has been fun meeting and talking to them. Everyone is so willing to help. One of the couples heard us asking about Bahamas cruising guides and came over later in their dinghy with one that they didn’t need anymore. They bought a new one and found that the only difference from the old one was the ads. We asked what they wanted for it and they said “nothing”. That was really cool.

As I have stated before, the dinghy is a crucial piece of gear to have while cruising. It is your “car”, getting you to and from places and your boat. At most marinas there is a dinghy dock where you park the “car” while you go ashore. Here is the dinghy dock at our marina:

This may look crowded, but it gets a lot worse than this sometimes! Common courtesy is to tie the dinghy to the dock with enough line that people can pull your dinghy away from the dock and work their way in to tie theirs off. They can get stacked 3 deep.

We are getting pretty comfortable with this way of life at this point. It is very different, and it is both challenging and rewarding. It gives you a completely different perspective on the world, and life in general. Stay tuned….

12/15/14
Fernandina Beach FL
Posted by Bill

We started the day, me drinking coffee and Tricia her juice, sitting in the cockpit and watching the water. Of course…more dolphins, just off of the boat.

Then we went ashore to go to the historic courthouse and get our Florida drivers license.

We established residency a few months ago, and Florida law states that you must get a drivers license within 60 days (I think that is what it was). It was important to have the drivers license at this time primarily because it establishes proof of residency for tax purposes, and we needed to also register to vote. So we did all of that and then went to lunch, then back to the boat so I could charge the batteries. This is pretty much the cruiser routine at anchor when you are not in transit, although most people have solar panels and wind generators to keep the batteries charged up. We wanted to wait until we got to the east coast to get solar. There is just not that many people in Ohio who sell and understand marine solar power, so when we settle down somewhere for a week or so, we will tackle getting solar panels.

The town of Fernandina Beach is very nice. There is a plethora of restaurants, most of them with really good ratings on Yelp. Two of them are old gas stations:


A cool church.

There are also lots of shops with all different flavors of stuff to blow your money on…not our thing if you couldn’t tell. At this time, I’d just like to say…God bless Tricia for being a woman that doesn’t like to shop!

Here are some street scenes:




The oldest bar in Florida, The Palace Saloon:

Some excellent wisdom from our forefathers. Please pass this around:

The Salty Pelican, where we ate last night…great food!

The dinghy dock:

The town Christmas Tree. They also have a nativity scene on public property…I love it!!!

Christmas is so different here. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas at all. I guess after so many years of what we experienced in Ohio this is going to be foreign, but I like it!

Then there are the birds. There are tons of birds all over the place, mostly cormorants, pelicans and gulls. This guy was feeding the pelicans scraps from his fish cleaning. They were standing around like dogs do waiting for something to fall. It was comical.

The weather is getting back to normal here but is still cooler that it usually is. Most are saying that next week will be close to normal. In the seventies today and lots of sunshine all week. This is the primary reason we are here and are tired of the lows in the 40s! After all…we are in Florida now! Lol!

12/11/14
Breakfast Creek, Georgia ICW
Position 31 56.195N, 80 40.673W
Posted by Bill

Well…we finally broke the hold that Beaufort/Port Royal had on us and pushed off the dock at 7:21 AM. We motored all day, moving through Port Royal Sound, past Hilton Head Island and Daufuskie Island; and wound along the ICW. Our first bad shoal area was Fields Cut, where the ICW meets the Savannah River, and we hit it 30 minutes after high tide…piece of cake! We made such good time that we made it to our preferred and furthest anchorage choice: Breakfast Creek. One never knows if the tides are going to be with you or against you because of the way the ICW meets the ocean and the tributaries that flow into it, so we plan for worst case, tide against us all the way and have several anchorage or marina choices depending on how well we are moving.

The views were very pretty along the way.
Looking back at Hilton Head on the ICW:

The famous Harbor Town and it’s light house on Hilton Head:

Haig Point light house on Daufuskie Island:

We also saw lots of dolphins today:

We only had one draw bridge to content with and we hit it during a period of “open on request” so we breezed through it as well.

Even after all of these ICW miles it still amazes us to see the number of homes like these.


Where does all the money come from? It just goes on like this for miles and miles.

We saw some pretty big boats as usual.

Then as we were making our way up the Vernon River to our anchorage, we saw this sort of forest fire, and the helicopter getting buckets full of water, dumping on the fire, and repeat. It was pretty cool as we have never seen this live in action before.

The anchorage is quiet and protected and lined by really nice homes.

Only bad thing is that it is abnormally cold for a few days. The last few days we were tied to our dock with the heat pump running. The next few will be at anchor. We froze all day in winds, albeit light, and temps mostly in the 40s. The low tonight and the next few nights will be around 42…and we don’t have heat at anchor. Yuk! Good thing we are only a few days from Florida and the temps are supposed to get back to normal…slowly.

Our excellent progress today will have us well staged for the next serious shoal area, Hell Gate.

11/7/14
Isle of Palms, SC
Posted by Bill

We stayed another day on Isle of Palms. Love this place, really been having fun with our friends, and we need to time the tide through the ICW between IOP (Isle of Palms) and the Ben Sawyer Bridge (into Charleston Harbor). This section of the ICW was described as “the worst and shallowest part of the entire ICW”. I wanted to have as much tide as we could have to make the passage and also wanted to have slack tide while we docked in Charleston so we waited another day. We did some administrative work, worked on the boat, and did passage planning for the next few days. We went to breakfast with Terry and Cas and they were kind enough to take us to the grocery store, then we walked the beach for an hour before starting the next happy hour. Terry and Cas met us at the restaurant next to the marina and we drank, played corn hole, and had dinner. Great time!!! We hope they can join us in Charleston over the next 3 days. We are going to miss them.

IOP beach:

Sunset at the marina:

10/24/14
Coinjock NC, Itracoastal Waterway (ICW)
ICW Mile Marker 50
Position: 36 21.089N, 75 56.865W
Posted by Bill

Today was our first day in the Intracoastal Waterway, from here on out abbreviated as ICW. We started early as we had to go 50 statute miles, through 5 draw bridges and a lock. The first part of the ICW was very industrial and busy with tugs, ships and naval craft. You can see the lift bridge in the picture. There are many bridges like this that lift up to let you go by. Most are train bridges and are normally left up.

Then we came to the Great Bridge Lock. This lock is used to control the tidal level downstream and takes you down around 5 feet. Having done the Erie Canal, this lock was really lame! We couldn’t believe that it took 45 minutes to get through this lock. In the Waterford flight of 5 locks on the Erie Canal, we went through 3 locks in that amount of time. At least they helped you position the lines from your boat.

On the way to the lock we passed the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier. It was impressive:

There were several other kinds of bridges including lift bridges that open at the center, and swing bridges:


Most of the bridges and the lock operate on a restricted schedule, so you have to time your arrival or you can be waiting an hour for the next opening. At the one swing bridge a barge came through in the opposite direction and we had to wait until it passed us before we could go through. We had to move over to the side of the of the channel and hold our position to let him through. It was not easy with the winds.

Especially difficult because at the edges of the channel there are stumps and submerged obstructions.

It took a lot of concentration all day to navigate the waters. It reminded us of the Erie Canal once we got out of the industrial section.

We saw lots of birds. These cormorants (at least we think that is what they are) were doing this weird pose with their wings open. Not sure what their deal was.

We made it to North Carolina and stopped in a remote area called Coinjock, staying at the Midway Marina and Motel.

Tricia called it the “Bates Marina and Motel” and was on the lookout for Norman and his mother. I called the whole area “Deliverance County”. The people were nice as can be and we had a really good dinner at the marina. Pic of Coinjock marina across the river:

Me, on the lookout for Norman:

We were exhausted from the trip and passed out after dinner, so I didn’t get the blog done until today. In the middle of the night our boat lurched and it sounded like someone jumped on board. I woke up, jumped out of bed…ready to kick some ass…and it was a damned tug boat blasting by. They threw a huge wake that slammed the boat against the dock. Wish I could have given them a piece of my mind.

Boat name of the day: Leaping Ground Hog
WTF!!! Who comes up with a name for boat like that? It has absolutely nothing to do with boats or boating or anything else that is normal. We heard them contact a bridge operator and the conversation went like this:

Boat:”Turnpike swing bridge…this is Leaping Ground Hog.”
Bridge:”This is Turnpike swing bridge…go ahead Sleeping Ground Hog.”
Boat:”NO…it’s Leaping Ground Hog…like jumping.”
Bridge:”OK Sleeping Ground Hog…we’ll have the bridge open in a few minutes.”