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