Sue wants to show her new pillows to her sister Judy. Along with many other things they are part of the recent work we did on the boat. Sue has really taken to living on a boat, and misses it when we travel away from it more than any other home we’ve had.

Click on any of these to enlarge.

Manatees were migrating through the Haulover channel.

We are at New Smyrna Beach City Marina, with our bow facing and just a few feet from Pelican Island. You can see it in the last picture of a previous post. We’re waiting a day here at mm (mile marker) 846 while we wait for a big storm to pass over. We left to come here from Cocoa Village Marina at 8, planning to continue on to a 3 day stay at a mooring ball just off the old part of St Augustine, FL at mm 778. Since the forecast for the next day (Friday) was heavy rain for most of the day we decided to sit tight and leave on Saturday when the weather is predicted to be dry if cold with a high of 68. Nice that our below drive station is working now.

68 miles is on the high end of a day’s trip for us so we’ll get up at 6 and be underway by 7. We should get there by about 3 PM. Since the ICW is marked in miles, and it seems everyone else not on the high seas uses miles, I reset the boat’s electronics to use them instead of knots.

We had a great day getting to here. We went through a quarter mile channel for the Haulover Canal bridge at idle speed because Freedom, the boat ahead of us radioed that a number of manatees were present. They don’t seem bright enough to avoid fast moving boats and their propellers. The autopilot kept the boat in the channel while we talked to a number of people fishing in small boats and on the bank. We got a good view of a few manatees but were late with the camera. I got one as it went back down. We’ve seen them before coming up briefly to get a breath in marinas. I’ve heard what I’m pretty sure are big splashes from manatee tail and their breathing when down on the swim platform at a marina.

Bottom part of a manatee back. Tail to right.

Before we got to that channel my depth alarm (under 6 feet of water) went off. We appeared to be in the middle of the channel so I asked Freedom and found they were reading about 12 feet as expected. Bama Dream behind us said the same. Since we were having a sounder problem I was able to switch on an alternate pair of sounders we have, and they read the same 11 – 12 feet. A call to Greg and we reset the depth system at least for awhile. Apparently another reason for that software update to our MFD’s.

I was especially annoyed by the depth alarm when it kept coming back on superimposed in the center of my two rear camera displays while backing into our slip here. That motivated me to turn off the depth alarm until we can get this fixed.

The weather was very pleasant but it did get a bit warm by the last part of the trip. Sue took issue with me taking my shirt off while driving. From the outside the low wall around the fly bridge blocks view of us from the waist down. She thought since they could not see below people might assume I was wearing nothing at all. Although I hadn’t thought of it till then, I could see someone driving that way on the open ocean many miles from anywhere. We finally settled on putting on a shirt when passing houses and populated areas. Maybe also when passing another boat unless a man without a shirt is driving.

An air force Delta IV rocket takes up a new GPS satellite.

Every once in awhile we have a happy accident. We have the other kind too but I’m not talking about that here. We left our mooring ball at Vero Beach at 8 and had an easy trip to Cocoa Village Marina at mile marker 899. On the way we passed another trawler who asked if we knew a good place to dock to see the rocket launch. What launch? He told us a rocket was scheduled to go up today! I new our destination was just across from Canaveral Air Force Base so I gave him their phone number.

I checked the internet and it was an air force Delta IV rocket carrying a new GPS satellite. Well, I’m all for that. Anything that will tell me more accurately if I’m in the center of the channel is worth my taxpayer dollars. The launch window gave us plenty of time to get there. We were backed to a dock at the marina edge that looked straight across to the launch site. All we had to do was set up the folding chairs.

That was completely unexpected. The last time we hit it lucky like that was the Geminid meteor shower we blundered into when we started a boat trip in Myanmar a number of hours before dawn.

We had nice weather coming up to Cocoa Village and a very pleasant trip. Yesterday on the way to Vero beach it was colder and overcast. Once we are underway after an early start Sue likes to nap on the bridge, and bundled up a bit to do it then.

The old downtown in Cocoa Village has gone touristy with gift shops, antique shops and restaurants. One store that resisted that was Travis Hardware. You can go upstairs for sissy stuff like home and garden, but downstairs is for nuts, bolts and tools. I saw wrenches you could use to bolt the main engines down on an ocean liner. Some of their open ended wrenches are 4 feet long! What kind of man uses a wrench like that? They should do a beer commercial about him.

We stayed in this mooring field near Port St Lucie, FL last June.

We attended the DeFever rendezvous at Old Port Cove marina 25 miles north of Lantana for 3 days before we left for the loop. We left Lantana at 9 AM and traveled slow, checking new equipment and systems. A few things did go wrong but a couple of phone calls to Greg got them explained. A couple of things await a software update to our new MFD’s (Multi Function Display) that will come in a month. Other than this everything worked well, which is great considering how much work was done.

We arrived at the rendezvous and spent the next 3 full days getting up early and staying up late meeting people, going to seminars and touring boats. Star Gazer was also toured and received many nice comments. Most of what we learn about boating is from talking to others and we learned a lot in the 3 days. We did learn that the DeFever type boat has the most interior room for its overall size. After seeing these boats and a number of other boats at some boat shows in Florida this winter we still feel that our boat was the best choice for us.

We left Old Port Cove at mile marker 1015 at the late hour of 8:30 AM and arrived at 4:00 PM at a mooring ball at Vero Beach, mile marker 950 (remember, Norfolk, VA is at 0). This trip was without event other than one 45 and one 25 minute wait for drawbridges. Waiting was much easier because our rear view camera (Greg’s idea) allowed me to back against the current without constantly sending Sue down to look out for close by boats. Fortunately nearly all other drawbridges are more than 20 feet at “high steel” in their centers, so we will run under them.

A mooring ball is a huge concrete block with a cable up to a floating ball. We grab a rope attached to the ball with our boat hook, pull it up and hook the loop at its end to a front cleat. If we used our anchor which is about 70 lbs we would need a length of chain about 7 times the water depth plus bow height. That’s 20 feet for us in 14 feet of water. We would be swinging around in a circle of radius of 140 feet. That’s 190 if you add our boat’s length. With a concrete anchor weighing several tons that total radius is reduced to under 65 feet, so a lot more boats can use a smaller space.

It’s also easy to leave. Just start the engines, unhook the mooring ball rope and go. Go very slowly because you pass within feet of many other boats at nearby balls.

Some of the new lighting in front and up on the top back of the fly bridge.

Star Gazer has spent a four months in Lantana, FL. We have been with it three of those, with the other month in Thailand. We used our Florida time to catch up on medical appointments, the IRS and any bills that might have slipped through the auto pay cracks. One great thing was that I got the cataract in my left eye fixed. I lack binocular vision and normally use only that eye. Now I can look way ahead and see the day markers in the ICW once more.

We also got a number of things done to the boat in Florida. The bulk of this was done by Greg Aukerman who we met when he worked on our boat in Washington, NC. We got on well together so he came down to Florida for a month while he stayed with us on the boat and did a lot more. Most boaters agree it is really hard to find people who will show up and get quality work done on a reasonable time schedule. Once they find that person they stick with him.

Greg redid electrical circuitry, added some new electronics and added various other items like some new lighting, windshield wipers, etc. He automated the electrical so if we plug into shore power it will run everything. Unplug and the boat switches to inverting AC power from our battery bank. If the batteries run low the generator starts up and runs until the batteries are recharged. Most of our time at anchor the boat is completely silent while it runs off the batteries. We still have plenty to do on a boat, but at least we don’t have to worry where our next kilowatt is coming from or whether the battery bank is properly charged and maintained, a much more complex process than I realized.

Now it’s time to leave and start the great loop. First we will go up to the DeFever rendezvous 25 miles north of here at Old Port Cove marina. We’ll meet a number of friends there, including Bruce and Mandy as well as other DeFever friends we met at Brunswick Landing during our first stay there.

Ethan & Aaron fishing at our Lantana marina. ICW in the background. We’re on the west side of it.

Lantana is more upscale area than our last Florida stop, with the larger cities West Palm Beach 20 minutes to the north and Fort Lauderdale 40 minutes to the south being even more upscale. Lantana is definitely more laid back and less crowded than those two areas, a great place to be. Staying here is like buying the cheapest house in a really great neighborhood and getting a great deal.

Sue can tell this overall area is more upscale than our last stop by the shopping and look of the town. I can tell because there are so few billboards with lawyer ads. I have not noticed any of that on local broadcast TV yet.

Star Gazer at Moorings condominiums. Docks are managed by Loggerhead Lantana Marina.

Our marina is poorly rated in the cruising guides because it has no laundry facilities, and no staff in our area. There are no pump out facilities either, so when that is needed we have to undock and go a couple of miles south to another marina for that. There is a drawbridge along that way but fortunately we will just barely make it under that. No staff means no one to help us in or out of our slip when we do move the boat.

I hope to have some modifications done soon that will make these things less of a problem for us. First, we’re having a sewage treatment facility installed. These are now quite small and do a much better job than a municipal plant. We’ll also install some things to make controlling the boat while docking easier.

We already have laundry so the disadvantages of this marina will not affect us much, and the advantages, like the complex’s gym, pool and spa are very nice, little used and always available to us and our guests.

What disadvantages? Boys play pool in one of the common areas.

Adam arrived two days after us. Our two older grandsons stayed on our boat while I dropped Adam, Harini and Derrick off at the Fort Lauderdale cruise port for a one week cruise. Our grandsons will swim at a nearby beach and fish here at the marina as the weather hopefully permits.

Waiting for a barge to cross. Note sign on piling at bottom of picture.

After pumping out and toping off our fuel at the Fort Pierce City Marina we just left the dock and had to stop, back up and retie as a construction barge for the new docks came in front of us. Once that was out of the way we took the scary channel out to the ICW. The channel isn’t so bad if you’re ready for it. It can have a very strong sideways current (the guy at the marina said up to 5 knots, but I think that’s stretching it a bit) that is OK if you’re ready for it. We’re told that some are not and get a good bash on the pilings or are swept out of the channel to run aground.

I had heard about this before we came here but coming in was still surprised by the current’s strength and got closer to one down current piling than I should have. I was better prepared going out and had no problem.

The day was rainy and a bit windy. Had we been going on the open ocean or great lakes we would have waited, but with Adam and his family coming soon as well as a few boat service people this was one of the few times we wanted to make schedule. It was grey with just a touch of light rain a few times. Dreary but not miserable.

Up to now we’ve had as many as 4 drawbridges on one trip. Today we had 11. Our air draft with the big antennas down (but usable) is 20’, so I’ll go under anything 21’ or higher. All but 2 of these bridges we could clear without opening. Those 2 had schedules, one hourly and one every half hour. With slowing down for boats in the water and passing marinas it’s hard to plan for the time of arrival at a scheduled bridge, but we were fortunate today to have waits of a few minutes at each one.

We’re at Lantana now, but the weather is still rainy and really windy. That cold front affecting the entire country is making it colder than usual here also. I’ll wait a few days to get some pictures before publishing this.

Boats crowded in. Star Gazer in center. Old town to the right of picture.

We have been in Fort Pierce several days while I took a 2 day (4 including road and air travel) trip to Coeur d’Alene, ID for my business. Sue stayed with the boat and had a great time because she only had to step off the dock to be in a very nice “old town” section of the city.

Even in Florida, older towns started on the waterway for easy transport of goods and people. That makes it easy for us to dock in the “old town” part of the city whether in Charleston, Savannah, St Augustine, Fort Pierce and a number of other smaller towns. Like many of these areas in the US, Fort Pierce is in the process of revitalizing the area, sprucing up the old buildings and bringing in new businesses.

One thing they brought in was a great farmer’s market/craft fair every Saturday. Sue said it was as good as “Art on the Green” in our former hometown of Coeur d’Alene. She found Christmas presents for daughter in laws, sister and other women we know and I came home to a lot of fresh fruit and other food.

We’ve heard that this part of Florida is a bit more depressed than other coastal areas, but I have figured out its main source of income. We get either cable or local broadcast TV at marinas. Here it’s broadcast. To understand the local economy you need to watch the local broadcast stations. In the Fort Pierce area the personal injury and class action lawyers clearly dominate all the commercials, with things like new cars and furniture a distant second. While driving around we saw billboards proclaiming “Get an AGGRESSIVE attorney”, “Get ALL you can”, “YOU may be entitled to BIG $$”, etc. We’ve even seen prime time commercials offering to consolidate your judgment payments into one lump sum. So that must be how the average person makes money, suing someone else. I wonder if I can get my share? Without getting hurt, hopefully.

We’ve had today for me to recover from getting in late last night. Tomorrow morning we’ll leave for our 4 month home in Lantana.

Our aisle at Ft Pierce. Star Gazer is 4th from front on Left.

After leaving New Smyrna Beach on November 10 we spent one night in Melbourne, FL at Melbourne Harbor Marina. We stayed there on the way north and had a great dinner at the nearby Mansion restaurant, so we went there again with similar results.

The weather was great for trip from Melbourne to Fort Pierce. We had an unusual amount of porpoise accompaniment. It seemed like they were with us about half the time. There were a few side scratchers, and twice Sue counted 9 on one side. I was busy making turns and staying in the channel, but snapped a few pictures when I could.

I can see six here, one is a bit under and right by the boat. Babies always to the outside.

The weather was great between New Smyrna and Melbourne as well, and for both trips we liked looking at all the beautiful homes and yards on the ICW. There is very little tide in some of the Florida ICW areas, so people have yards and lawns just a couple of feet above the water level.

It seems like Florida has as many boats as all the rest of the US put together. We passed so many marinas coming to Fort Pierce City Marina. Most boats in this marina are about the size of ours and we’re all really packed in here. It may be the largest we’ve been in except for Charleston and there is construction now to double it’s size and to dock much larger boats.

Part of New Smyrna Beach from our bow.

We left St Augustine on Saturday at 7:00 and backed into a slip at New Smyrna Beach City Marina before 2 PM. Backing in required a 180 spin and lining up in a limited area that proved pretty difficult. I still get a bit disoriented with only the down directed camera to see in the back. We made it in after a couple of back and forths, but I’m going to have to work on that. Our next marina, at Melbourne, will require that as well as our destination marina at Lantana.

Even though I took it slower today, under “porpoise speed,” a couple of them followed us for awhile anyway. We noticed them because one kept jumping out and landing flat on his side with a big slap on the water. Scratching an itch?

We walked two blocks into town and found streets parked full of “classic” cars on display. We could not get to the end to see all of them. No really high end cars like Rolls, Bentley, Ferrari and such. Mostly American with a few British. There were a few from the 30’s, more from the 40’s, but most were 50’s and newer. The sure built them big back then.

Sue found a car just like her family’s Ford when she was little.

Like many Florida coastal cities, this one is jammed against other cities on three sides and maybe there is another one on the Atlantic side of the ICW, so there were quite a few people in the small downtown area. After seeing the cars we turned into a Thai restaurant which proved better than many we’ve been to in the US.

Now that we’re running a boat we’re used to checking the weather more often, and also monitor a weather radar iPad app that gives us a better idea of what is coming. Rain was coming and would last all day the next day, so we spent today at the marina also.

It’s 5:30 now and we just got in from the bow, where the low sun was lighting up the town across the ICW. We’re parked bow out and can watch birds including pelicans an ibis are coming back to their small island just in front of us, as well as porpoises hunting in front of that.

This evening the birds all came back to this little island. Hunting oysters to the left.

Some rain tomorrow, although not as much. It does look like most of it is passing south of us. Hopefully we won’t go far enough to run into it.