Leg#1-B, 3/24 to 3/31/13, Ft. Pierce to St. Augustine

We stayed an extra day in Ft. Pierce because of high winds but were able to enjoy the large Farm­ers Mar­ket with music and then on Sun­day a nice jazz fes­ti­val. The winds were pretty wild along with some seri­ous rain late in the day.  Our AGLCA burgee blew away and is lost !

We left Ft. Pierce around 9:30am Mon­day and headed for Vero Munic­i­pal Marina.  We hooked up to a moor­ing ball for the first time in this boat.  Our only moor­ing ball expe­ri­ence has been at Catalina Island in Cal­i­for­nia and this was much eas­ier.  A cou­ple from Con­necti­cut on the neigh­bor­ing cat came over on their dinghy.  You learn about so many dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios for trav­el­ing and liv­ing on a boat. They sold their house and now live on aboard and travel south to the Bahamas every year.  They didn’t look very old, maybe early fifties, if that.
We walked into down­town Vero Beach for lunch and my new favorite ice cream at Kil­wins, salted caramel !  We took the dinghy across the AICW for din­ner, had a drink at Dock­side Restau­rant and din­ner at the Lob­ster Shanty.
Off to Cocoa at 7:45am.  We docked at the city docks with quite a bit of wind and cur­rent and also some of the high­est fixed docks we’ve encoun­tered so far.  This is dif­fer­ent for us as it makes get­ting on and off to tie up harder.  Their peo­ple helped us get in and tie up–but we’re still not totally edu­cated on this method of tying up with all of these spring lines.  With these fixed docks, when the tide changes the boat needs to be able to go up or down that dis­tance, some­times just a cou­ple of feet but can get up to 8 or 9 feet.
Cocoa is a nice stop.  Lots of lit­tle shops and restau­rants within walk­ing dis­tance.  We ven­tured through Travis Hard­ware and Ken even went back and found a few things to fin­ish the pvc pipe cre­ation for the locks.  He also ordered a new burgee post and fit­ting that was lost in the winds at Ft. Pierce.  Din­ner at a raw bar that had mostly fried foods and a stop at a karaoke bar with a vari­ety of good voices and songs we’d never heard before was our evening entertainment.
On to New Smyrna Beach and their munic­i­pal marina the next day.  Very nice small town with nice lit­tle shops where I bought Ken some new boat shoes that you can put in the washer.  They have an extremely nice art gallery–Arts on Dou­glas– (http://artsondouglas.net/) with quite a few tal­ented local artists.  It was quite impres­sive and even more so for the size of the town.  We ate two meals at Jason’s, din­ner and breakfast–must have been good.
We left for Day­tona Beach the next morn­ing for a short hop of only about 17 miles which made it an easy day.  Hal­i­fax Marina is close to old down­town with a nice mix of restau­rants and shops.  We went to the Hal­i­fax Museum and walked the town.  We took a cab over to the Beach side–Ken made me do the rac­ing track and it was fun but we didn’t do the “sling shot”, we ate ice cream and taffy, walked around and took a cab back–no thanks to that side of the city.  We had din­ner at McK’s with over 200 beers and bought some Smith­wicks Irish Beer at their shop next door (300 bot­tled beers for sale).
The next day we pulled in to Marineland.  This dol­phin facil­ity has been in exis­tence for many years run by var­i­ous enti­ties and is now being refur­bished.  If you want to do more than watch, you need to make reser­va­tions in advance which we did not do.  Still, it was nice to see the dol­phins whole bod­ies at once through the glass walls.  We see dol­phins almost every day we are out mov­ing.  Often, they fol­low the boat rid­ing the waves pro­duced by our wake and as I learned at Marineland, this action saves them energy and helps get them where they want to go.  I cooked din­ner on board this night !  This hasn’t been hap­pen­ing very often because there is always some­where that we want to try the food.  We met up with Terry and Ken from their new boat  “Round­about” for a drink on SSIII.  We had talked to them via the inter­net and AGLCA blog.  They are tak­ing their new boat back home and will start the Loop in 2014.

On to St. Augus­tine the next morning–another short hop of around 17 miles.  These short days are nice.  Though we often travel through areas at around 6–7 mph so even a short dis­tance like this can take us 2 to 3 hours.  We were greeted with music on the docks when we pulled in and it con­tin­ued for much of the time over the week­end.  We are keep­ing the boat at Conch Marina for the sev­eral weeks until we return.  We rented a car so were able to get some pro­vi­sions and drive to din­ner at Salt Water Cow­boy Restau­rant.  We also did the trol­ley tour which reac­quainted us with St. Augustine’s lay­out and his­tory.  We went down­town to walk the next morn­ing with break­fast at a lit­tle Euro­pean bistro.  Such a beau­ti­ful city.
I left for home on Sun­day night with Ken com­ing the next day.  We did this because we were afraid that my sched­ule of get­ting back here on the 31st might not give us time to get the boat set­tled so Ken gave him­self an extra day.  This proved valu­able because he was able to get a few things arranged for repair on the boat while we are gone.