St. Augustine to Vero Beach

We left St. Augustine on Monday morning. My brother Dave left the boat for the Jacksonville airport around 6:00 AM and we left the slip at 6:50 AM. We wanted to make Vero in three days on the ICW and the total distance is 174 miles. We had really good current with us heading south. We were making 8.4 knots for the first couple of hours and then started slowing as the current slowed. We were around 6.8 knots most of the rest of the day. There were only a few other boats heading south at that time.

We were behind a boat named Bamboushay that all of a sudden turned sideways in the channel. Sandy was at the helm and immediately went to reverse to stop our forward movement because she thought for sure they had hit bottom, and sure enough they did. There draft is one foot deeper than ours so we didn't have any problem with that area, also we stayed to the green side of the channel which was recommended for that area. Bamboushay was able to back off and get going again.

About 3:15 PM we had the anchor down in Rockhouse Creek which is just north of New Smyrna Beach and just inside the Ponce De Leon inlet. There was a smaller sailboat that had beach during low tide next to the anchorage. I figured they did it on purpose to clean the bottom. The boat was about 25 feet. When high tide came in around 8:00 PM they moved out to deeper water and anchored.

On Tuesday morning we started off at 6:55 AM. There is a bridge that was 3 miles away that opens on the 20 minutes starting on the hour and we wanted to make the 7:20 opening. We made it there with several minutes to spare but they were doing maintenance on the gates that stop road traffic and didn't get the bridge open until 7:50. So much for timing. We had good current this day also although we were not going as fast. We made our second anchorage of Cocoa around 2:50 PM. The weather had continued to be good with the sun shining and temperatures around 75.

On Wednesday we again left just before 7:00 AM and had no problems making the third leg to Vero Beach. We arrived around 2:20 and went into the fuel dock to get a holding tank pump out. While at the dock we got our mooring assignment. We were to go to mooring ball 28 and raft up with a boat named Chanticleer. The mooring field was very crowded with most moorings having either two or three boats on them. Vero is the place to be for a cruisers Thanksgiving get together.

We were looking for our mooring and the boat named Chanticleer. We had to zig-zag between other boats and came to the area where we thought we needed to be. Low and behold there was a Chanticleer boat on our starboard and another one on our port. This could only happen to us. We couldn't see the number on the mooring ball from where we were so we had to pull forward of the two boats to see that we wanted the Chanticleer on our port. We hailed the boat and the couple on it helped us raft up to them. We then talked for about an hour with them and found out they are from Texas also. From the Houston area. They are also heading for the Bahamas and them plan on doing the thorny path south to the eastern Caribbean.

When we came in to the mooring field we saw that the boats Destiny and Song of Pogo were here also. We had been in several anchorages and marinas with them since North Carolina and were offshore with Destiny for 30 hours. We had gotten together with them, Jimmie and Bess and Otis and Marty for dinner in St. Augustine. Our cruising plans are all similiar so I'm sure we will see them in the Bahamas too.

We plan to stay here for a week or so to do our major provisioning and we are still waiting for the pet import papers to arrive from the Bahamas. Once all that is done we only have to head down to north Lake Worth and wait for a weather window to cross the Gulf Stream and over to the Bahamas. I will keep y'all informed.