Our plan this week is to just hop down the coast of Florida.   Weather permitting we are 2 weeks away from our Florida home, Loggerhead Marina of Palm Beach.   We have a slip waiting for us and are looking forward to not traveling every week.   We’ve been traveling for about 90 days and we are looking for a break.

We had a good trip from Marineland to Daytona Beach.  Left the dock at 7:30am quietly and uneventful.   There were 2 draw bridges to get through, again, no issues.  Wind was low.  The current was against us so we went 5 mph vs. 6 mph.  This added an hour onto the trip arriving at 2:30pm.   We’re at Daytona Marina and Boat Works which is a working boat yard.   Nice walk through downtown Daytona, cute area and had a good lunch.    It rained at night with a lot of lightning but it was the far away kind.

We left at 8:20am the next morning and Jan captained the boat off of the dock into the channel and into the ICW.    Today was a short trip to New Smyrna Beach.   We arrived at 11:20am.    The trip was uneventful except for the George Munson Bridge opening.    The vertical clearance for the bridge is 24′, my mast is 49′. We had the current against us until we passed the Ponce De Leon inlet when our speed went from 4.9 mph to 8 mph.    The bridge is about 1 mile passed the inlet so we flew up to the bridge.     When there is current pushing you to a towards a closed bridge you end up doing loops and circles in front of the bridge.  Our speed would go from 8 to 2.9 back to 8 mph.   This bridge opens every 20 minutes so we did loops and circles for 15 minutes.    After a better docking than previous attempts we had a nice lunch and toured downtown New Smyrna Beach.

Leaving the slip Wednesday am we again had docking issues.  When we cast off the lines and put the boat in reverse it spun 45 degrees vs. going backwards.   Imagine doing a 3 point turn inside a single parking space!   Fortunately we did not have a heavy current and were able to man handle the boat back into the correct position to get out of the slip.

Our trip to Titusville was uneventful and that is a blessing.   We’ve left early every morning this week before the winds picked up and any thunderstorms rolled in.   High winds can make a journey uncomfortable and add to your travel time.    Going to Titusville we had to travel on the Indian River which is a very wide body of water.   We were blessed as the winds only got to 10 mph and were behind us the whole way.

When we arrived at the Titusville Municipal Marina we got fuel before going to our slip.   We only took 10 gallons after traveling  100 miles.   In the marine world it’s not miles per gallon that is important but miles per hour.    We have travelled 17.5 hours since our last fill up for an average of .58 gallons per hour.    We recently talked to a delivery captain who took a customers 84′ yacht up to Baltimore.   They went outside the ICW into the Atlantic Ocean and averaged 20 miles an hour while burning 175 gallons of fuel an hour.

On Thursday we went from Titusville to Cocoa Beach and it was an uneventful trip.  It was easy getting out of the slip in Titusville and just as easy getting into the slip in Cocoa Beach.   We are staying at the Cocoa Beach Marina behind some condo’s.  These buildings provide some great shade in the middle of the afternoon.  Cocoa Beach has a cute downtown and nice restaurants.  We have been getting thunderstorms late in the afternoons and evenings.  Last night’s thunderstorm was pretty crazy, made us very happy that Scout was in Boone with Tyler (she does not like thunder).

More to come,

Jan & Matt