2010 TRIP SOUTH

December 1, 2010


Our summer was fantastic! Not only did we get to spend some time in Kauai, but we also did a great driving trip. Spending time with our friends is always a special treat, and we did a lot of that too.

Kauai, HI

Well, after a great summer we always look forward to our trip of 1,000 miles down the ICW. Every year we seem to enjoy the trip more than the previous year. This year we spent a little more time in marinas than we did anchoring which is not how we usually do it, but we are working for the Waterway Guide again. This time we are updating the entire ICW and part of our responsibilities involves verifying the facilities at the marinas. We don’t critique per se, but we like to make sure that they are properly representing their facilities. So we tend to stop for the night and peruse what they have. It’s great…we meet a lot of new people and explore new areas. We still anchor out a lot, just not quite as much.



Marina being rebuilt

 We left Norfolk, VA on the 9th of October and started our migration south. The weather was supposed to be good for us for the next few days. We stopped our first night in Coinjock, North Carolina. The marina only has one dock, but it is 1700 feet long. It’s a face dock so everyone is tied up on the same side (not uncommon on the East Coast). Their claim to fame is a 32-oz. prime rib dinner. We ordered half and still took some of it home. It’s fantastic! The next day we were off heading toward Belhaven, NC. It was going to be a long day so we got an early start. The hardest thing on this leg is the crossing of the Albemarle Sound. If the wind is blowing 15 knots or more and opposing the current, it can be HELL!!! We hit it on a really great day, very smooth, which was fine by us. We’ve had it the other way around and it’s not pleasant. We stopped at the Dowry Creek Marina. We are especially fond of this marina because of the people. They’re exceptionally friendly. We were only going to spend one night there, but they talked us into staying the next day because they had a group of Canadian cruisers there and were going to have a special dinner to celebrate Canada’s Thanksgiving. So we had an early turkey dinner with all of the fix’ns.

With full tummies and blown diets, we headed out the next morning to Beaufort, NC. While talking on the radio, we were told that some people we knew were going to stop for a night in a marina that we had heard about but had never been to before. So we changed our plans and spent a night in the River Dunes Marina in Oriental, NC. This is definitely one of the nicest marinas we have ever been to, and the facilities ashore are incredible. In the restrooms the showers are steam showers, there is a beautiful pool, two spas, cabañas, and outside bars. It is very upscale yet surprisingly inexpensive!

Beaufort, NC was our next destination. It’s not very far from where we were so we had a short day on the water. We hadn’t been to Beaufort for 3 or 4 years so we needed to make sure what was and wasn’t still there. We spent a couple of days walking around town and watching the local high school’s “homecoming” parade, and then we continued to travel down the waterway. Stops in Carolina Beach, NC, Myrtle Beach, SC and then onto

Homecoming Parade Beaufort, NC

Not quite Macy's Parade

Georgetown, SC were on the agenda. We have friends in Georgetown so we spent a couple of days there to visit with them.

Georgetown is really a pretty little town that has gone through a lot of restoration over the last few years. There are some very stately homes that have been restored and a lot of really old buildings in the town. It’s a nice walking town with friendly folks. Georgetown, at one time, had a small steel mill and also a paper mill, but those have mostly gone away.

One of the restored homes in Charleston, SC

Charleston, SC was next, but we decided that we have been there several times fairly recently so we would catch it on the way north in the spring. We anchored in Charleston, though, and continued on the next day to Beaufort, SC. Yes, there are two Beauforts. One is in NC and the other is in SC, both are small but charming little towns. Our favorite is Beaufort, SC., it’s incredibly friendly and very pretty. We also like to stay at the Port Royal Landing Marina. It is family owned and operated, has great hospitality, a loaner car, fun little bar and grill, plus nice facilities. We like to stop for a couple of days, especially when we have been traveling for several consecutive days.

South Carolina marina

When we got moving again, we traveled through Savannah, GA this time instead of stopping. We’ve been there several times and decided that we would stop next time going north. We think that when we do stop, we will go into the downtown area and dock. We usually stay on the outskirts of town and take a bus into the downtown area. Anyway, we anchored out for a night and continued on the next day. We decided to anchor in the Duplin River. There is nothing there, but it’s protected and secure for a night’s stay. Over the years, we have gotten used to anchoring in remote areas all by ourselves. The only problem with it is that if anything really happens, you’d better be prepared to take care of the situation yourself because it could be awhile before help arrives. In most of the really remote areas, your cell phone won’t work so you have to hope that the VHF radio aboard will be heard.

This year we decided that instead of stopping at either Jekyll Island or Cumberland Island, we would stop at St. Simons Island and also the town of St. Marys, GA for a change. Both places were really great. St. Simons is a resort destination with a lot of upscale shopping and some amazing homes. It was larger than we had visualized and much more developed. It was a good stop and one that we would probably do again. The town of St. Marys is quite small. The main part of town has one street with all of the businesses along it, and is only about 3 or 4 blocks long. When we arrived, they were filming a movie called “Eye of the Hurricane.” They had made the town look as though a hurricane had just blown through it….debris everywhere…it looked horrible. After they cleaned it up, it looked normal again. There is almost no automobile traffic, but it’s probably one of the friendliest towns we’ve been to in our travels. We met a couple, Jim and Paula, who we hung out with for a couple of days. It’s always fun to meet new cruising friends.

It's supposed to look like a hurricane just went through

A small house in St. Marys, GA

At this point in time, our trip south was almost complete. Florida is only about 4 miles from St. Marys, and our friends Dave and Elaine MacDonald’s home and dock are only a little over 100 miles away. They invite us to dock and leave Diamond Girl there while we travel home for the holidays. It is really great knowing that the boat is being looked after and secure plus we get to spend some time with them and have a ball.

Now we are at our youngest daughter’s (Traci and her family) home in Tualatin, OR. We got here for Thanksgiving and will stay for a time. Then we’ll fly to CA to visit our older daughter (Michelle and her family) for Christmas. The first few days that we’ve spent in OR the highs have been in the high 20’s and low 30’s, a far cry from the 70’s that we are used to in FL. Oh well! However, it has warmed up to the mid-40s during the day.

When we return to Florida after the first of the year, we will take a few days for projects on Diamond Girl and then get back to what we love to do……”moseying” down the waterway.

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HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL



Summer of 2010

It’s only been about 3 months since we did our last posting, but we have covered a lot of ground in that time. We completed our trip north on the Intracoastal Waterway (the ICW), then left the boat in Annapolis for a couple of weeks to fly to Hawaii for a week on the beach in Kauai. After getting back to Annapolis, we rented a car and drove the entire Long Island Sound area (we drove through Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, part of Massachusetts and the full length of the northern shore of Long Island) and returned to Annapolis again. The reason we did the Long Island Sound trip by car rather than by boat is that the Waterway Guide wanted us to update as much of the landside facilities as we could within a fairly short period of time.

Kauai 2010

Here’s how we did all of our travels:

After leaving the Alligator River area (the end of our last posting), we crossed the Albemarle Sound and headed to Elizabeth City and the entrance to the Dismal Swamp. We had another great trip going up the Swamp and still enjoy all of the wilderness areas and the camaraderie that exists between the boaters that are doing the Swamp with you. There is always a group of boaters traveling together along the Dismal Swamp because of a bridge and lock at both ends that opens on a strict schedule. Because of the schedule there are always boats that accumulate waiting for an opening, hence you all travel together. Also because the entire length of the Swamp is a “no wake zone” so that means everyone is going to be going slow.

The Dismal Swamp

North Carolina

Upon leaving the Dismal Swamp, you arrive in Portsmouth, VA. We have been here many times and have always anchored out in a fairly large bay just off of the ICW. However, this time we decided to try the free docks that are available right in the middle of town. Well, for the very first time they were not fully occupied so we tied up and stayed for a couple of days.

Hampton, VA is one of our favorite little towns so we made that our next destination. It’s only a short distance from Portsmouth, but we always need to stay at least a day or two. Elaine has a favorite place to get her hair cut and the timing is always right, so that’s one of the reasons for the stop. After a couple of days, we decided that the weather looked pretty good for a trip north on The Bay. We took off early morning with Deltaville in our sights. The weather was predicted to be light so we thought that the long day would be great. It was….for the first couple of hours, but then everything started to go sour. The wind picked up to 20 to 25 and the seas got really rough. What was supposed to be a great day turned out to be “crappy.” We kept going and really got beat up, but we eventually made it. Good old Diamond Girl took good care of us once again. It’s really uncomfortable when it gets so rough, but the boat just plows on through it and we sit back and “piss & moan.”

The people who own the Waterway Guide also own a couple of marinas and had invited us to stop at their marina in Deltaville to get acquainted. We took them up on the offer and had a fabulous stay there. After a few days at Regatta Point Marina, we headed farther up the Chesapeake Bay to Solomon’s Island. As always Solomon’s is a wonderful stop. I’ve never really understood why we like it so much…but we do. We stayed on the hook for several days, saw some of our cruising friends who live there and met a bunch of other folks.

After spending time in Solomon’s, we moved on up the Chesapeake to the South River. It’s sort of the back side of Annapolis, but you’d never know it. The creek has homes on one side and a park that has been left natural on the other side. We’ve been here before and really love it because it’s so quiet. We stayed for a few days and then moved on to our friends Nan and Terry’s dock because that was where Diamond Girl was going to stay while we did some traveling.

South River

Annapolis, MD

Nan and Terry’s dock and part of the Luce Creek,

Annapolis, MD

We had a wonderful trip to Hawaii! We got to spend some really quality time with our daughter Traci and her husband Matt. Plus, we had a blast with Maci, our youngest granddaughter. We had won the use of a really nice condo for a week on Kauai. Since we won because we had bought the winning raffle ticket from Maci’s preschool, we thought they should join us on our getaway. We had a great time…a lot of beach time and pool time. We did a bunch of sightseeing and a lot of just loafing around, too. It was a fantastic break from the boat!

The Queen's Bath on Kauai

Everyone's having a good time!

We got back to the boat after being gone almost 2 weeks and, as always, it was great to be home with our own bed and routine. But we didn’t have long because we needed to leave in just a few days to start our “road trip” through the Long Island Sound area. So, we rented a car and left. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what the Long Island Sound is, we’ll try to briefly explain. It’s actually a bay that is created by Long Island, NY and the coast of several states; NY, CT, RI, and MA. It begins at City Island, NY and the top of it is Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. The length is about 200 miles long and about 15 or so mile s wide. The LI Sound is beautiful with a countless number of rivers, inlets, coves and tributaries along its vast shoreline. We visited anywhere that there was any kind of a boating facility. Remember, we said it was 200 miles long. Well, we traveled almost 2,000 miles. We rarely ever got on a major highway. We were always on secondary roads or just plain residential streets. We could never had visited everywhere without our little GPS for the car. We would call ahead to our next destination and get their street address and punch that into our GPS and off we’d go. We actually had a great time. It was a lot of work and took us almost 3 weeks, but we felt it was worth it. But we have to tell you…living out of a suitcase and a different hotel every night is not something that we want to do on a regular basis.

Mystic Seaport, CT

Cruising friends John and Media...their beach bungalow in

Watch Hill, RI

When we got back to Annapolis, we worked on the boat for a few days and then set off to cruise for the rest of the summer. We have visited a lot of the same places that we’ve been to before and also some new ones. There is so much to see and do in the Chesapeake Bay…it’s endless. It is a truly amazing area for boating enthusiasts.

We just escaped from a boat yard the other day after having completed several projects. We needed to have some fiberglass repair work done. Since it was going to take several days, we also had our dinghy pulled out of the water and blocked up so that Bud could completely recoat the Hypalon as the sun had really done a number on the fabric. Now everything looks practically brand new, and we are once again doing what we seem to do best - cruising and relaxing.

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BandE

January through May of 2010

Wow! Here it is May and we haven't done a posting since February. Well, we have a bunch to catch up on.

The last post left us in Naples, FL. From there we traveled up to Cape Coral and spent some time with our friends Rick and Candice who we had met 4 years ago in Deltaville, VA. We had a great time with them, as always, and then decided that we needed to get moving up the west coast of FL
.

Rick and Candice on Wings

Pelican Bay anchorage on Cayo Costa Island is a very popular spot with the local boaters. You will always find a good number of boats anchored there. It is one of the most protected anchorages on the west coast of Florida. We stayed there for just one night and then proceeded up to Sarasota. What a great city to visit. Everything is conveniently located near the waterfront, so from a boater’s outlook it’s great. Some very dear friends from our days in California (Dave and Nancy) were visiting his father who lives in Sarasota. We were able to spend some great quality time with them and reminisced a lot about the good ole days in Ventura, CA. We hadn’t seen them for a couple of years so we really enjoyed our visit. We stayed in Sarasota for about 5 or 6 days waiting out some windy conditions.

Pelican Bay on Caya Costa Island

Finally we were off to Tarpon Springs where we were going to leave the boat and travel by car up and around the Big Bend of Florida to Mobile Bay, Alabama. We got lined up with a marina, tied up Diamond Girl so we could leave her for a week, and rented a car for our journey. We had decided that taking the boat around the Big Bend just wasn’t practical for what we needed to do. As you might recall from our last posting, we are now working for Dozier’s Waterway Guide as cruising editors and part of our territory is the Big Bend area of FL. It starts around Tarpon Springs and continues along the “Big Bend” over to the Alabama border. Most of the water in the area is too shallow for our 4-foot draft on the boat. We couldn’t travel by boat into some of the areas anyway, so doing it by car seemed more practical. What we found was a very “down home” atmosphere. A lot of back woods type area. Very small marinas, some with limited facilities, some that catered to small boats only, some that were well maintained and some that were horribly maintained. All in all, it was a fun trip. We did a lot of updating for the Waterway Guide and saw a large portion of the country that we had never seen before.

Tarpon Springs...Sponge Capital of the World

When we got back to the boat, we decided to stay in Tarpon Springs for a couple of extra day in order to do some sightseeing. It is a small town that is advertised as the Sponge Capital of the World. It’s mainly a Greek population. The Sponge Docks are the one and only attraction and they are interesting. We did what is expected of tourists; we window shopped in all of the little souvenir stores, ate some delicious Greek food, and actually had a good time. We don’t know that we’ll go back again, but it was certainly worth seeing at least once.

Another work boat in Tarpon Springs

At this point we were interested in starting back down the west coast and heading across the Okeechobee Waterway to the east coast of Florida. We made stops in Bradenton, Pelican Bay again, and to Bimini Basin which is a really neat anchorage in the middle of Cape Coral. We spent a couple of days in Bimini Basin with outboard motor problems. Rowing our dinghy around isn’t exactly fun so we had a mechanic come to rebuild the carburetor and get us going again. Fortunately, it wasn’t a major repair and didn’t take very long because we wanted to get going again.

Crossing Florida on the Okeechobee Waterway is one of our favorite trips. It takes you right through old Florida. Most of the little towns were originally founded either for the sugarcane industry or the railroads. Some of them haven’t changed much and still have the old flavor to them. Unfortunately, some are slowly dying away because the young people move away seeking jobs that just aren’t available to them there. But for people like us, that like to explore around, they make for a great stop.

On the way up the Caloosahatchee River you have to transit three locks before you get to Lake Okeechobee. At the first lock, which is Franklin Lock, the Army Corps of Engineers while building the lock also built a campground and an eight-slip marina. You can stay in the marina for only 48 hours, and it is only $24 a night. If you have a Golden Passport card that is for seniors, you can stay for $12 a night. So... being old has some advantages. We stayed 2 nights! The next stop was a little town named Moore Haven. There isn’t much there, but it is a good spot to get an early start in the morning for crossing the lake.

Franklin Lock in Florida

Crossing Lake Okeechobee is pretty straightforward. It’s 25 miles across and extremely shallow. In the middle of the crossing you will find 12 or 13 feet of water in the marked channel, but if you stray out of that channel you might be aground before you know it. There is a very well marked channel, and if you stay in it there will be no problem. Once you’ve crossed the lake, there is another lock to transit and then you are in the St. Lucie River. Indiantown is just a short distance down the river and an interesting stop. It is one of the popular places to keep a boat for the hurricane season. They have a huge storage yard, and they strap the boats down with four-inch nylon straps.

Coming into Indiantown

We left Indiantown and took a straight shot for Vero Beach. It was a long day, but we were ready to get someplace to stay for a little while. It turned out to be a week. We’ve written about Vero Beach before. It’s a very boater-friendly town. All of the services are convenient to the marina for everything you might possibly need. Next we were off to Palm Coast. It’s a two-day run up the east coast to get there. We have some very good friends there (Dave and Elaine) who allow us to use the dock behind their house. We always have a great time with them and look forward to seeing them again.

St. Augustine was our next stop. We belong to an organization called the MTOA. It stands for Marine Trawler Owner’s Association. Well, they were having a rendezvous in St. Augustine and we wanted to attend. There were seminars, some workshops, and a lot of camaraderie. The group is made up of trawler owners who are very active with their boats. A lot of the members are just like us and cruise full time year around. These gatherings are a lot of fun, and we always look forward to attending. This particular event had about 50 or 60 boats and somewhere near 200 people.

After the rendezvous, Dave and Elaine MacDonald traveled north on their boat with us for a few days. When they left us to return home to Palm Coast, we began our trip north to the Chesapeake Bay once again. We have now done 4 roundtrips from Florida to the Chesapeake Bay since we came back here, and we’re starting our 5th. From Palm Coast, it is 800 miles up to the Chesapeake Bay which takes us about 3 to 4 weeks to complete (depending on weather). We enjoy stopping in all of the little towns along the way, and there are numerous anchorages that we like to stay in for a day or more. All in all, it’s a great time! Believe it or not, we still look forward to the trip every year.

One of the towns that we always look forward to visiting is Savannah, GA. We don’t stop right in Savannah but just outside of the city in a town called Thunderbolt. The marina is a really friendly place and quite convenient to the bus system if you need to go anywhere. But that isn’t why we stop there now. The real reason is because the timing of our arrival almost always coincides with our wedding anniversary, and there is a little restaurant that has almost become a tradition for us. It’s called Tubby’s Tank House. This year some new friends (Dick and Elle) just happened to be there too, and they joined us for dinner. It was a great evening! Tubby’s is not a fancy place; it’s just a very down-home style restaurant with a lot of southern hospitality and some great rocking chairs out on the front porch. We’ll do again next year! Also, every morning at 7 a.m. the marina places a newspaper plus a box of 6 warm Krispy Kream donuts on your deck. What more do you need in life…right?

Tubby's Tank House

Dick and Elle on Summer Wind

Right now, we are in the Alligator River Marina waiting out some windy weather conditions. Tomorrow we’ll leave and go across the Albemarle Sound which is one of the worst bodies of water that we need to cross on the entire ICW. You want to pick the weather very carefully as we have learned from past experience. The trip north is just about to end as far as getting up to the Chesapeake Bay. We should be there within a couple of days. This year, though, we have decided to continue through The Bay and head up to explore the Long Island Sound to Block Island. The people at the Waterway Guide want us to cover that area for them which will give us a purpose to travel farther north. It should be fun as well as interesting, and we are really looking forward to a new adventure. If you want to get more information about the Waterway Guide, go to www.waterwayguide.com. It’s a great publication, and we feel privileged to be working with them.

The end of another day in Paradise

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47 Great years together

Bud and Elaine

Cruising South Florida and the Keys

When we left Vero Beach back in late January, we were going to continue down the ICW to Ft. Lauderdale to start our new writing assignment. Our first stop was at Lake Worth. It’s actually in Palm Beach and is very popular with the boaters headed to the Bahamas. It’s a large bay that is well protected with good holding for your anchor and some really pretty scenery. We were surprised to see Tiger Woods’ boat pulling into a marina just after we got our anchor set. The marina where we saw it is where he keeps his boat PRIVACY. We don’t know if he was aboard at that time but probably not.

After stopping there for the night, it was off the next day heading to Ft. Lauderdale. The trip isn’t too far, but there are 28 bridges along that stretch. There are probably more bridges in that section than on the rest of the ICW total. It took us forever. Between the “no wake” zones and trying to schedule the bridges that had to open for us, it was a nightmare. Fortunately we are able to get under most of the bridges without them having to open. However, it still took us almost 9 hours to go about 40 miles when it should have taken us about 5 or 6 hours (seems slow doesn’t it?). We did see a lot of fantastic homes. Some of the homes had to be 10 or 15 thousand square feet, and a lot of them also had huge boats tied up at a dock in front.

We stopped in Ft. Lauderdale at the New River Marina. It’s a great place because you’re right in the middle of town and walking distance to just about everything. New River is a very narrow, tight river running right through the middle of town and has an amazing amount of boat traffic. You’ll see little boats like ours (36 feet or smaller), and then you’ll see a maxi yacht of 150 feet or more. It’s unbelievable…and most of the river isn’t more than 100 feet wide with boats tied up on both sides. You have to see it to believe it. We wonder sometimes if everything will fit.

 The New River...it's crowded and narrow

We stayed for 3 or 4 days in Ft. Lauderdale and then decided to continue to Miami. Miami is the very first place that we stopped after arriving in Florida four years ago. So we thought that it was the perfect place to begin our 5th year of full-time cruising. We needed to do a bunch of updating to the Waterway Guide so we took a couple of days and did some writing trying to get used to our new “job.” All we really do is update the existing copy in the books and make any changes or comments that we deem appropriate. In some of the areas there are a lot of changes and in others there are no changes to be made. It’s up to us. Anyway, after a few days in Miami waiting for some good traveling weather, we moved on south to Dinner Key which is in Coconut Grove, FL, and it’s in the upper Keys. We decided to stay in a marina because we needed to have someone come and check our batteries. We were having a problem and needed someone who knew a lot more than we do. After finding our problem, we had to wait out some bad weather before we moved to “No Name Harbor”. Still in the upper Keys, it’s a place we had heard a lot about but had never been to before. It turns out that it was everything everybody had said and then some. It was a great spot! There was room for about 20 boats or so to anchor and very popular with the local boaters who could come in and tie up for the day (overnights are not permitted on the wall) to the seawall and have lunch or dinner. It was crowded, but we had a good time.

No Name Harbor on Biscayne Bay

Bud and Elaine with Biscayne Bay in the Background

Again, we waited out some nasty weather for a couple of days and then were off to Key Largo, which is the official start of the “Keys”, at least according to a lot of people. We decided en route to skip Key Largo and continue along for 20 miles to Islamorada which is another spot we stopped at four years ago. There is a tiki bar and restaurant there called Lorelei’s that was closed the last time through because of damage from Hurricane Wilma. We anchored in seven feet of water just off shore and out of the channel and later in the day we went ashore for “happy hour.” Wow, what a great place. Part of the building is enclosed but most of it is open air. You can eat out on the beach where they have tables and chairs or in the tiki bar where they have live entertainment every night. It’s a really neat spot and one that is on our “do again” list.

Off the next morning bright and early to Marathon, one of the most popular spots in the Keys. Next to Key West, Marathon is a major jump-off spot for the Canadians who are going to Cuba and everyone else who is trying to get to the Bahamas. This year those two destinations have been tough to get to because of the weather. In order to get to either Cuba or the Bahamas, you need to cross over the Gulf Stream. When making the crossing, you don’t want any wind from the north because the waves in the Gulf Stream get huge. This year we have had a tremendous amount of wind and most of it has been from the north. That’s one of the reasons it’s been so cold down here. Well, when we got to Marathon everything was full. All of the moorings (225 of them) and the marinas (several) were jammed. Fortunately we had called a couple of days prior to our arrival, and one of the marinas said they were full but might be able to accommodate us. We called the marina and they said they could put us up if we didn’t mind being tied up to the seawall. “Absolutely” was our reply. Well, when we arrived there were four other boats tied up there also. We had everything including cable TV. In talking to the boaters behind us, we found out that they were from Simi Valley, CA (which is where we lived for 35 years). We couldn’t believe it! She had graduated from Simi High School, and he’d had a business there for a number of years before they moved to Colorado. It’s really a small world!

We ended up staying in Marathon for 10 days. We really had a great time. We knew several people in the marina and were able to get some projects done on the boat that we had put off. All of the services for boats are there and supplies are easily available.

Sunset in Marathon

Marathon is always crowded

We waited once again for weather to improve. We needed to cross the Florida Bay and enter the Gulf of Mexico in order to start heading up the West Coast of Florida. Our course would take us almost due north and, of course, that’s where all of the storms had been coming from. We needed a good 3-day weather window. A short stop in the Little Shark River, which is in the Everglades National Park, then on to Goodland was our itinerary. The Little Shark River is unbelievably remote. Nothing works there; no cell phones or computer, nothing ashore…nothing but mangroves. It’s very pretty and a really protected anchorage. The night we were there, there were fourteen boats anchored, everyone just traveling through the area.

Diamond Girl anchored in the Little Shark River

The second day we left early and traveled to Goodland. It’s a very modest town, what there is of it. We wanted to go there because the Waterway Guide hadn’t been updated in this area for quite awhile. Getting to Goodland is a real experience. Very shallow! Looking at the charts we knew that there were some areas that would be challenging. We were right! Our boat draws four feet. We got down to 4.2 feet several times while entering the pass to Goodland. Once we got into the pass and the small channel, it got deeper and that was a relief. We passed the small town, and found several markers that were missing (that’s why we were reviewing this area) and a few other shallow spots, but we also discovered how beautiful an area it is. It’s dotted with small islands that are nothing but mangrove forests. They are so thick that you can’t see into them more than a few feet. We were very glad that we had ventured into the area because not very many do with our size boat.

We stopped for the night at Marco Island. It’s an upscale area and the start of all of the high-rise condo buildings on the West Coast of Florida. You can see them for miles from out in the Gulf. We’ve been there before so we just used it as an overnight stop, and then we moved on to Naples. Naples, also, is a very upscale town. It’s much larger than Marco with more shopping, restaurants and boutique shops. It will definitely be a stop for us again.

The other day we had some California friends call us. They were here visiting some mutual friends of ours. We met for lunch and got caught up on all of the gossip from So Cal. We had great conversation and it’s always nice to be with friends.

We will be off again soon to continue up the Florida West Coast. And, as always, we will keep you up to date.

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STARTING A NEW YEAR

In the New Year, when we arrived in Florida from Portland, OR, we couldn’t believe that it was colder in Jacksonville than in OR. Something is wrong here. We had just spent Christmas with our daughter and her family in Portland, and before that we had Thanksgiving in California with our older daughter and her family. Two months in all. We got all of our annual doctor visits out of the way, saw a lot of our good friends, and were able to spend some good quality time with our family. It was great!


The one thing that is really difficult about traveling like we do is that we really don’t see our dear family as much as we would like. I know it’s our choice, but it is still tough. We’ll continue to cruise and enjoy what we’re doing, but we will still complain about missing family.

We left Palm Coast the 18th of January and are continuing south on the waterway. After stopping a couple of nights we finally arrived in Vero Beach, FL which is where we are now. Vero is a great place and sort of a gathering spot for cruisers doing what we do. There are also quite a few boats that wait here for favorable weather conditions for crossing the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas.

This year we are going to be traveling and working at the same time. We have been hired by the Waterway Guide to be Cruising Editors, making updates and changes to their guide of South Florida, the Keys and the West Coast of Florida. It sounds as though it will be fun and interesting and still allow us to do what we love most….cruising. The Waterway Guide is the most respected cruising guide on the East Coast. Every cruising boater will have Waterway Guide aboard their boat. Our responsibility will be for the navigation, dockage and anchorage sections for each of the areas within our territory. It will give us the opportunity to go into a lot of areas that we might not have explored otherwise. The people at Waterway Guide have certainly been extremely nice to us, and have welcomed us into their fold. We’re looking forward to it with much enthusiasm.

We will leave here in a few day and start down to Ft. Lauderdale where our territory starts. From there down to Miami then down to the Keys to Key West. Hey…it’s a tough life!

Since we haven’t really done much since we’ve be back from the holidays, this will be a short posting. We’ll bring you up to date as we progress.

Also, don’t forget to sign up as a follower on this blog and don't forget to include a photo when you sign up. It’s fun for us to see who is following our exploits.

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BandE

Diamond Girl