Full day of motoring as we left beautiful St. Augustine headed for Daytona Beach. I spent another miserable night and most of the day wishing my stomach would settle. I'm pretty much convinced I was not sea sick after all, but am fighting a mild flu bug, although there was nothing mild during the night crossing!!
Today was fairly uneventful. Another day of swamps, trees and beautiful houses, but nothing interesting to write home about.
We found a very nice anchorage, I baked chocolate chip cookies, and promptly went to bed. Greg woke me for supper, which was so delicious ( must be feeling better) and I went back to bed.
Allan, are you envious? I'm in Daytona and you're not :)
47 nm today
Day 82 - Nov. 5
Today will be called the "Day of the Dolphins". We saw so many of them today. It was great! They seem to be such happy, contented creatures...the way I wish we could be.
Looks like we were the sleepy heads this morning. All the boats that arrived yesterday were gone by the time we pulled out. Just as well because we tend to be the slow poke in the pack and everyone ends up passing us anyway. We actually passed one boat today, only to find out he was having engine trouble, which explained how we were able to pass him. :(
We are now on the Space Coast, home of the Cape Canaveral Space Center. We could see the launch area quite aways out, as well as the Kennedy Space Center, a very large building out on its own.
We pulled into Titusville to anchor. Titusville used to be the space capital, but from what I've read is only a shell of its former self. Unless you tour the Space Center, there's not a lot to see or do here. All irrelevant for us as we don't plan to go ashore. Greg has already seen the Space Center and said he wouldn't mind going again. We plan to rent a car in Vero Beach in a couple of days so if time permits, we may drive back this way to take the tour.
41 nm today and btw, I'm feeling much better....finally!
Day 83 - Nov. 6 Melbourne
Today was..."interesting"! I could use numerous other words to describe it, but they would all be profanity, so I'll leave it at "interesting". Let's start with the depth sounder. We had issues with it right from the get go. We weren't past Carter's Beach when it started to act up. At first it was only in deep water, so who cares. Then it would play games with me as we were coming into an anchorage. This is where redundancy comes into play. We had a fish finder wired in so Greg got in the habit of setting it up as we were approaching an anchorage. Then when we hit the Chesapeake with so much shallow water, we started using both depth sounders together.
So now, today....both the primary depth sounder and the fish finder were going wonky. One would show 188 ft and the other would be 2-3 ft when I was actually in 10 ft of water. Considering the channel is only about 50' wide and shallows to 2-5' outside, I need to know if I stray too close to the side. Ok...I can deal with this. There is a magenta line on the chart that runs through the ICW channel. I just zoomed in real close on the Chartplotter and made sure my boat icon stayed on the magenta line. No problem. But wait! The day's not over. I'm watching the Chartplotter when all of a sudden my course and boat disappear. All I see is the Indian River on the plotter. I do a search for the boat, nothing. I begin to panic. How quickly before I stray off course into the mud? After a minute, my boat is back and I put us back on track. Ok, now I'm taking visuals and lining up compass course, just in case. Ten minutes later, the screen goes black. I got nuth'n. Greg sets up the Garmin Chartplotter (another redundancy I'm glad we had) and I find my course. He then goes below and turns the power off and on for the Raymarine Chartplotter. In a few minutes, the screen is back and the fishfinder appears to be cooperating. No further gremlin attacks today.
Other then that, we had a beautiful, warm, sunny day with very little boat traffic. We settled into our anchorage with only one boat further down the cove, and enjoyed a quiet afternoon.
To make us feel better, we had 20-30 dolphins give us a wonderful display around our boat for almost 1/2 hour. It wasn't until they started to leave that we thought about videotaping them. :(
35 nm today.
What a great trip you are having...must be getting warm there all the time.
ReplyDeleteIt is getting colder here. I love reading your blog keep it coming.
We go home in 4 weeks for a month of Christmas holidays.
Travel safe, Curt.