South Florida Vibes

Pictures: the beach at Oleta River State Park, North Miami, with bilingual signage; Heidi and Digna Meija in Boca Raton; flowers blooming in Stuart (I have no idea what they are but they were pretty); kayaking in the mangroves at Oleta River

They are trying to keep some of the natural wonder in Florida – the slogan for the State Parks is “the Real Florida”. It is working, to some extent. We are anchored right now in a bay just a quarter mile from the Intracoastal Waterway where there are mangroves three-quarter of the way around us. Ken is catching small fish and we are watching other thinner fish jumping clear out of the water.  This is the Oleta River State Park, Florida’s “largest urban park”. Just behind the mangroves rise a row of 25 or 30 story buildings. Last night we were visited by a huge Met Life blimp, the third different blimp we’ve seen this week. They must have a schedule so the blimps don’t bump into each other!

So we have alternately busy days and quiet days. It depends on the day of the week, as weekend days are busy everywhere you go here. And it depends on where we choose to anchor.

In Fort Lauderdale we anchored in Lake Sylvia. We have been here before and we know it is out of the wind and good holding ground. When we arrived it was very full of anchored boats. We were on the far side, close to shore because of the lack of anchoring room. We headed out to a favorite “watering hole”, a bar called the Southport. However, our dinghy route in the canal system was blocked by police boats. We tied up to a city dock about three blocks from the Southport and found that there was a car in the canal near the city dock with a body in it.  (The next day the paper reported that it was a 52 year old man and the car was a white Mercedes convertible. No other information about how it got there.)

The following day a woman came out onto the back lawn of her large house on the edge of Lake Sylvia and asked us to move. She was having guests later in the day and we evidently were not something she wanted her friends to have to see! No use in making an issue out of it; we moved. Anyway, most of the boats that were here the day before had left, probably because it is good weather to cross to the Bahamas.

On our third night in Lake Sylvia we had a car alarm or house alarm going off almost the entire night. It’s time to leave!

In the past ten days we have visited with several friends. We stopped in Stuart, which is near Rio where we were in our last blog. We called Tom Coleman, a Marblehead friend who now has homes in the Stuart area and Newburyport. He also has a boat in Florida. We had a good time catching up on his news. Stuart also has a very nice marina with inexpensive moorings for rent and very clean showers and a laundry. The city is quite interesting; we will try and stop there and stay a little longer on our way back.

We visited with Olga Nohe in Delray Beach. She picked us up near where we had anchored and took us to her house. She and Brian moved there 10 years ago from Cohasset. We had a great visit and enjoyed hearing about the Nohe "children" and getting an update on the new headphone business Brian is involved in, working with ”50 Cent”, the rapper.  The next day, in Boca Raton, I biked to Florida Atlantic University where Digna Meija, a former co-worker at Boston University, now works. She showed me around the Engineering Dept. and we got caught up on what’s been happening since we saw her three years ago.

In Lake Sylvia we found Jessica and Dave, new friends that we last saw just before Halloween when we were all in Chesapeake City and heading south. It was good to see them and find out how they have been. They are from New Brunswick and this is their first trip down the East Coast.

We expect to stay in the mangroves and quiet state parks as long as we can before we head back towards Ft. Lauderdale to meet Tammywhen she flies in there and has a five-day visit with us. We have our kayak off the top deck and have used it every day.  There is a rental place here for bikes and kayaks so we find their orange kayaks circling our bay off and on. There are canals and small rivers to explore, and a university campus on the next peninsula has bike trails and nature trails. The state park beach is beautiful and the water here is aqua-colored. We’ll be visiting Miami with Tammy; it’s just 10 miles from where we are now. Of course there are the South Beach and Little Havana highlights to catch, but we also hope to get to the Bill Baggs State Park on Key Biscayne to balance out the city with the “Real Florida”!

Slowing Down the Pace

Pictures: Ken's new bike, in front of the Vero Beach City Marina showers/laundry/lounge building; our neighbor in Rio, a great blue heron looking pale in the flash; our boat at the Rio dock; kids playing in the surf at Vero Beach (Christmas can't seem to come soon enough down here -- they began playing Christmas music on the radio before Thanksgiving)

We have spent the past 10 days mainly in two places: Vero Beach, on the Florida coast, and the Rio section of Jensen Beach, on the St. Lucie River. This is so different from the schedule we had in getting to mid-coast Florida where we would be in 8 different places in 10 days and at first it seems that we are slacking. But no, we are in warm, mild weather and we don’t have to be anywhere at any particular time in the next few weeks.

Vero Beach City Marina is chock full of boats at their mooring field and their marina. We ask to be at a mooring and we are rafted with a 42 ft. Nordhaven from New Hampshire.  Our neighbors are a nice retired couple who live in Boxford, Mass. We are also following a group of boats from Annapolis, Maryland, who we first met in Cumberland Island. One of the “ring-leaders” of this group is a couple we met three years ago on a Tayana 37 (like we had at the time). Mark and Julie introduced us to the crews of three other boats and we hung out with them quite a bit at Vero Beach. Mark and Julie will need to head back to Annapolis, by car, as Julie (an Englishwoman) is having her interview and test for U.S. citizenship in two weeks.  The others are headed for the Bahamas – they may already be there as I type this. So our newfound group won’t be with us after Vero Beach; we end our stay there with a big Happy Hour party at Waldo’s on the beach side of town.

Ken and I spent quite a lot of time walking and alternately bikeriding while we were in Vero (and also in Titusville earlier) since we just have one bike. So Ken gave in and decided he would like to get a folding bike of his own. He now has a shiny black Schwinn with a comfy seat and cool ergonomic grips. We had a long ride back from the bike shop in the downtown part of Vero after he bought it, over a bridge, into the wind, but it was a good test ride.  Another ride took us to a town park and beach where we took a long beach walk, only the third time we’ve been on a beach on this trip.

Before we left Vero we introduced ourselves to Steve, a solo boater in a trawler at the dock. He’s from Duxbury (it does help with meeting people when you can read the town they’re from on the stern of their boat). He’s done the trip to Florida from Duxbury eleven times!

In Rio we have friends we met on our first Florida cruise who get us a space at a dock where a marina and restaurant used to be. Hurricanes had helped to demolish the buildings, which have been recently cleared off the land. Other problems have kept the dock space pretty much empty. We join our friends (working on fixing up a “new” boat they have just bought) and 5 or 6 other boats (mostly rehab projects). There is also a launch here that is used to access a schooner, anchored out in the St. Lucie River. The schooner is a former freight hauling boat that worked in the Buzzards Bay and Islands area, in Massachusetts. It was named LILY OF TISBURY and is wooden, and not very old. It is now just called LILY and has Maine as a hail. The current owners take out paying customers and leave from Stuart and surrounding towns. Today they have it at a festival on Hutchinson Island nearby.

So we are running errands in a car for the first time on our cruise, with our hosts Chris and Kevin Buckley. We got to meet Kevin’s brother who is visiting and is taking side trips each day for serious bird watching. He twice rented an airplane to get him to isolated spots to find birds that have been elusive. We finished a few projects that we just didn’t get to before we left home in October. We ate some good meals with the Buckleys. And we sat out a torrential rainstorm over the past 36 hours that left our dinghy three-quarters full of water (that’s a lot of water!) and a lot of stuff wet in our boat because somehow several large windows were open during the first night of the storm. We officially had more than 7.5 inches of rain (the report came in before the storm had ended).  It’s the first daytime rain we’ve had in six weeks.

We are still loving the wildlife here in central Florida. We saw manatees surfacing by our boat in Vero Beach, we have fish jumping clear out of the water in the dock area we are at now, and there is a great blue heron sitting on a piling that’s 12 feet from our stern each evening.  We have a new Audubon Florida guide now to help us learn more about what we are seeing

More Fascinating Nature, More Friendly Humans

Pictures: Rowers in Eau Gallie basin at sunset; PISCATOR leaving St. Mary's alongside us (the owners are from Vermont and took 18 years to finish the boat after buying a bare hull);large manatee backside, as big as a dinghy, as it does the "dead-man's-float" near the dock in Titusville; view from our boat of the St. Augustine waterfront with the moon about to set overhead (we were very close - this is not a telephoto shot); punch servers at the day-before-Thanksgiving party in St. Mary's (we lost all the pictures of the yummy food and boaters waiting to eat, sorry!)

Thanksgiving Dinner in St. Marys, Georgia was so much better than we had expected. We were assigned to cook a vegetable side dish, and each other boat crew was bringing one side-dish (or dessert or relish, etc.). Several townspeople cooked turkey and made gravy and stuffing and it all was assembled at the Riverview Hotel. Being a hotel, the seating was very comfortable, the buffet tables held warm and delicious food, and the camaraderie between boaters was an added dimension. We were about one-third down the line (there were estimated to be 210 people served).

The night before there had been a dock party with Painkillers Punch mix and ice provided (BYO for the rum). We could have attended an oyster roast after the party but opted out. Other gatherings were held in the days before we arrived. And there was an organizational VHF “meeting” each morning of Thanksgiving Week that you could listen in on and contribute to from your radio on your boat. It works like an old-fashioned party-line with announcements and requests and things for sale.

We met a couple from Scituate (who are traveling with two other boats from Scituate), a couple from Marion, and people from Vermont and Maryland, our tablemates at dinner. Just before dinner we were set-upon by a drifting sailboat in a difficult windy situation in the river. We tried to get another anchor down for the boat since the crew was ashore. They eventually got back and straightened things out but then in moving to a new spot to anchor, they went aground for several more hours. In the end we got to talk with the crew and they were a very nice family from Jacksonville, Florida. The mom is a veterinarian and their 13 (ish) year-old son was outgoing and not too embarrassed by all the commotion.

Since Thanksgiving we have bought fresh bread and veggies at the Fernandina Beach Farmer’s Market, have kayaked to a Jacksonville City Park – an island with walking trails and fishing docks, have sat with cruising people and tested micro brews while watching the Patriots in St. Augustine, have watched manatees lazily feeding on underwater grasses in Titusville, and have enjoyed the company of a couple from Middleton, Mass whom we’ve seen at several stops on the Waterway this week (we chatted some again last night when they stopped at our boat, moored next to their boat in Titusville). We also crossed paths with a family from Marshfield who have brought their two children along and are homeschooling while they sail and cruise.

Today we ended up in a wonderful “basin” just off of the Indian River section of the ICW. The area is called Eau Gallie and is part of Melbourne. The basin is part of a river but there isn’t too much current and we are out of the wind. It’s not isolated; there are nice homes on the edges of the basin and two quiet marinas, but there are only 3 boats anchored in here and the wildlife is plentiful. One pelican is persistently dive-bombing into the water, several osprey are calling from rooftops and mast tips, a manatee is about to surface near our boat, and lots of different wading birds, the long-legged kind, are flying around us. There’s a park full of palm trees that we’ll dinghy to and walk through, back at the entrance to the basin. I haven’t seen any other boats moving in here except our dinghy and another dinghy. Then all of a sudden at 4:30 pm a rowing shell with four rowers and a coxswain passes us, then two eight-man shells. They continue to pass us every 10 minutes or so as they go up and down the river. We find another group of eight practicing on a dry-land rowing machine in the park. There is a banner there indicating that they are from Melbourne High School. This is a great stop!