It's a little breezy and uncomfortable anchored in front of the City Marina but it gives us easy access to town. The wind will fade eventually.
But it's warm!
There were a few cool days in Charleston with some pretty cold nights but it wasn't too bad. Mostly 60s with plenty of 70s. Since we've been in Florida it's been mostly 70s with some 80s. And nothing lower than the mid-60s at night. We can handle that... until the first winter norther comes through. Last year it was the second week of December but it's still November (25th) right now. Black Friday as a matter of fact. We arrived in Fort Pierce Thanksgiving afternoon and had a scrumptious dinner, without killing any poor bird or pig.
We had a very quick trip here. Much shorter than last year timewise. That's because we went offshore from Charleston to St Augustine bypassing Georgia (yay!) and the northern part of Florida (boo!). I like the ICW in the northern part of Florida but not any of Georgia. 31 hours of very blue water with an amazing encounter with a very playful pod of dolphin. The overnight was reasonably warm, okay cool, not like last year when it was very cold. No sailing was involved even though we had the mainsail up. There was a fairly big swell from the east because of several days of windy weather before we departed. But no waves on top of the swell due to little wind. You wait for good weather to go offshore if you do not want to deal with big seas but you end up not sailing. Oh well.
From St Auggie went went back to the ICW and went to New Smyrna Beach for one night. Don't have any idea where the old smyrna is. From New Smyrna we headed down my least favorite stretch of the Florida ICW. This goes inside of Merritt Island and the Kennedy Space Center area. They are preparing for a launch (today, the 25th) of the mission to explore Mars again. We believe we could see the launch vehicle but when we went by it was sheathed in the gantry. We stopped at the mouth of the Banana River in a nice protected spot in front of some very expensive homes. The one we parked in front of had nice friendly owners who said hello and liked our boat. From there we headed to Ft. Pierce, and here we are.
One interesting event on the last passage was encountering a small (10ft) skiff right next to the ICW near the Sebastian area that said it was disabled as we went by. Carol was on the helm and didn't quite understand what they wanted. We realized they said they were in trouble and we furled the genoa and turned around and called the Coast Guard. They had never stopped fishing so it wasn't apparent they were in trouble. They weren't, they were out of fuel. Wanted some of ours. We saw another small powerboat coming and signalled them to come over and tow these idiots. We couldn't have brought them where they wanted to go due to shallow water. They only downside to all this nonsense, besides a few minutes of time wasted, was we had started the distress process with the USCG and had to finish filling out their forms over the VHF and cell phone even though we had left the scene to the other vessel who was towing the Floridiots to shore. Oh well. It was good practice if we ever encounter a real distress situation.
I don't know if I just coined that term 'Floridiots' or heard it somewhere before. Maybe from a Carl Hiaasen novel, or James Hall. Probably Dave Barry. We've encountered plenty of Florida boaters. Probably the standard percentage are idiots, same as at home, but when you meet up with them you just have to wonder.
Anyway, we're here. It took the end of September to the end of November but we're here. Ready to spend some time in southern Florida. Then the Keys. And maybe even get over to the Bahamas early next year. We can hope.
