Lake Worth to Great Sale Cay and then to Green Turtle Cay

Lady  Ella gets her anchor up before us so she heads toward the inlet in front of us. We’re not sure about FFF but head out about 1:40am. The inlet is well lite and we have no problems leaving. We see more lights so we know more boats have the same idea.

We finally reach FFF on the radio and find out they are several hours ahead of us! Those cheats! They decided they were doing the crossing and neither of them could sleep, so they headed out about 11:00pm. Well, we are glad they are going even if they did cheat.

We had a good trip for the first several hours then we got into the Bermuda Triangle. Our GPS stopped working! No big deal! It just lets us know where we are! We don’t need it! Wrong! We called out to our fellow travelers and told them we had problems and we hoped to get them straightened out soon. We followed behind Lady Ella and Shay went below to “fix us”. We are so used to knowing exactly where we are all the time. And when you are in a big dark ocean it’s even more important. There are no markers, lights or buoys out there to follow.  After a while Shay got us straightened out and we were ok, but it was not fun for a while. We will be getting a new GPS antenna to use on the return trip. The thing is, we put on a “new, old” antenna this summer. It was a 15 year old antenna that had never been opened but it was still old and doesn’t do what we need.

We got to Memory Rock in the daylight and headed on toward Great Sale. Rocking B had left Ft. Pierce Inlet, heading directly for Great Sale and should get there before us. We had great weather and water, very calm and easy on us. This is our best water/weather passage to the Bahamas.

Lady Ella looks good.

We got to Great Sale and anchored about 5:30. We traveled 101.23nm at 6.4kts for almost 16hrs. Oh, we had a visitor follow us into the anchorage. We were motoring along and heard a strange buzzing noise and looked up and saw Ken’s drone alongside us. He got a great video of us coming into the anchorage with the setting sun in the background. Thanks Ken. We will treasure it! It’s good to see Rocking B here. We have missed traveling with them. Lady Ella is near by and FFF went to the top of Great Sale to anchor. They just have to be different. I know, they want to get to Donny’s dock early so they can get the best spot!

Rocking B waiting for us at Great Sale

 

It’s been a long stressful day and we want to get our chores, dinner, showers done and settle down. We checked in with the others and plan to leave about 5:00am.

Oh no, I messed up. We kept talking about leaving at 5:00 so that’s what I set our alarm for. To get up at 5:00 not leave at 5:00. We told everyone we would leave as soon as we could and we were sorry. Ken said he wondered what was going on when he didn’t see any lights on. Next time sound your horn! So we brought up the rear as we headed out the anchorage. FFF was way out in front, then Ken, Lady Ella, then Escape. Lady Ella dropped back behind us, they had a funny noise going on. Thought they may have something around the prop. Had a beautiful Bahama sunrise and great trip to Green Turtle. Several other boats left the anchorage besides our group and we kept seeing more add on to the caravan as we passed by other anchorages. The closer we got to Green Turtle, the more boats we saw.  And all the ones in front of us seemed to be heading to Green Turtle. Well, we hope they won’t all head to Donny’s Dock! There were at least 12 boats racing in when we did and we heard others calling Donny on the radio. One boater said “Let the races begin!”

Our first sunrise of the Bahamas.

Rocking B

We got here around 2:00pm. We traveled about 54nm at 6.5kts for a little over 8hrs. We had a great time with beautiful calm waters. 

Lady Ella

Cute little boat

Entrance to Black Sound. We are close!

We talked to Donny and he had our same dock from last year open for us. He did have to move another boat, but it had moved when we got there. FFF and Donny were on the dock to help us in and we had no problems. Lady Ella got settled in and Rocking B went to the “family dock” for a few days until another boat left the big dock.

We all got settled in. It takes a while to get all the lines adjusted, the fenders out, the boards on and the power plugged in. But it’s good to be back!

 

We plan to spend a couple of months here again. We hope to see friends we made last year on the island and meet lots of new ones this year.  

Vero to Lake Worth 2017

It's been a great place to stay, but its time to leave.

 

We left Vero about 7:45 on January 17^th. FFF left from Bobby’s house, so they are ahead of us. We had a good trip except for some “skinny water” near Ft. Pierce.  We were there near low tide and noticed the water getting shallow. Just as our depth alarm went off FFF called us on the VHF and told us to be careful at buoy 188A. And that’s where we were. We slowed down and made it thru with no problems but it was another reminder that you have to stay alert and pay attention. I think FFF had a little more problem with that area, since they have a deeper draft, but they made it thru too.

Beautiful houses along the ICW

We saw some beautiful water as we pasted the St. Lucie Inlet, beautiful sand and turquoise water. Makes me think of the Bahamas. We are on our way!  There were 5 boats anchored at Peck Lake, glad we hadn’t planned to anchor there.  There have been a lot of boats heading south today, since this is the best weather window we’ve seen in a while. Hope there’s room in Hobe Sound for us and FFF.

 

I love this barge and tug! I can just imagine the fun someone has on these!

I know I'm close to the anchorage when I seen this beautiful gingerbread house!

We got to Hobe at 3:15. We traveled 42.66nm at 5.7kts for 7.5 hours. There were a few other boats there, but we had no problem getting settled in near FFF. There is a fire close by and the anchorage is very smoky.  We got settled in and had a good but smoky night.

FFF in Hobe Sound

When we got up the next morning the smoke was so heavy that it looked like fog.

Smokey morning. We could see the smoke the night before and smell it all during the night.

Very unusual dinghy, see the clear back and side areas?

Jupiter Inlet

We left about 7:45 heading to Lake Worth.  This will be a short day and we want to get there as soon as we can. We still have lots of last minute things on our today list, like call everybody one last time, get our ditch bag out, get Bahamas flags out and get ready for the crossing.

Our ditch bag is one thing we hope we never need. We have water, food, first aid kit, knife, flashlight and lots of other things we might need if we had to leave the big boat. It will go into the dinghy with us.

We also have to get things ready for the overnight passage. We get out a sleeping bag for the bench on the fly bridge.  We are always on watch and that lets one of us get some sleep. We have our auto-inflating life jackets and our heavy duty life jackets out of storage and ready to grab as needed. We wear an auto- inflating jacket when we come downstairs at night. The heavy duty one is for rough seas.  We stand our antennas up in case we need to use the VHF radio. We can use them with the antennas down, but the range is not as good as up. We usually keep them down when we are traveling in the ICW, so we don’t accidently leave them up when going under the lower bridges. We will be communicating with FFF and Lady Ella as we cross. Yes, Lady Ella is here with us. We will transfer fuel to the tank under our bed to make sure we have plenty for the trip across. You definitely don’t want to run out of fuel on a crossing. So we will have a busy time today.

Jupiter Lighthouse

 

 

You can see this colorful building a long way off.

They flood this barge, put big boats in in, put stands under the boat, let the water out and then work on the boats.

 


I'd hate to have to get in that escape boat. But what choice do you have?

 We got here about 11:00. We traveled about 17nm, at 5.3kts for a little over 3 hrs. We had a good trip. We passed by some beautiful houses and saw some pretty water along the way.

When we got anchored we noticed they were working to raise a sunken sailboat. We had seen the boat here last year but it looked ok then. They worked on it several hours but got the boat up that day. Boy, was it dirty.


I told you it was dirty!

Shay has spent hours trying to schedule this crossing so we have the best – weather, moonrise/set, and sunrise/set. We have a good moon and even more important the moonrise/set work out really good for us.  

The moon doesn’t do us any good if it comes up early in the day and sets early at night, as it sometimes does. On Thursday, the moonrise is at 12:04am and is 59%. We plan to leave around 1:00am, so that’s perfect.  We will have good light for several hours and will get to Memory Rock after daylight, so that’s good. We plan to get to Great Sale, our first stop, around 6:00pm Friday. Sunset is 6:00pm so we want to get settled in before dark. We’ll have dinner, showers and then get to bed early since we leave early in the morning. We plan to leave Great Sale Cay around 5:00am and get to Green Turtle Cay around 2:00pm at mid tide so we won’t have any problems getting into Black Sound.

FFF is anchored in the Lake Worth Inlet closeby. Lady Ella is anchored south of the inlet where we are. As I said, we are planning to leave around 1am along with Lady Ella. FFF has some issues and not sure if or when they will leave. So we need to get our chores, dinner, showers done and get to bed ASAP.

Beautiful US sunset! Our last for a few months.

 

Time in Vero 2016

Of course, as always, we had a great time at Vero. It’s always one of our favorite stops and a great place for us to spend time until we head over to the Bahamas. It’s a good safe place to leave the boat when we go back for Christmas.

We are undecided about what we will do this boating season. We have talked about going to Green Turtle again but we have also mentioned going to Washington DC. We are thinking if we do go to DC, we should probably stay in the states, so we can get an earlier start to DC. We’d like to spend May there. But we are not sure yet. Guess we will decide later.

Rocking B, Ken and Margaret’s boat, has been here a few weeks and we are mooring with them. We have arranged with Salty Turtle, Vic and Gigi, to be aboard Rocking B to catch our lines. Ken and Margaret are not on the boat until the beginning of 2017.

Tying up to a dock is different than tying up to a boat on a mooring. The dock is stationary, the moored boat is not. If we go up to Rocking B without helpers, I have to take a line from Escape to Rocking B. Let’s think about that. Ain’t gonna happen! I don’t jump or hop. End of discussion. So we have Salty Turtle on stand-by as we travel down the waterway. No problems getting tied to Rocking B. We are secure.

We got here a few days before Thanksgiving and as usual there was the “CLODS and Cruisers” Thanksgiving Celebration. “CLODS” are “cruisers living on dirt”. So they are people than used to travel on boats and now live on land, but can’t cut the lines completely. It’s always a big celebration. The Clods provide the ham and turkey and us cruisers bring appetizers, sides, and dessert. Salty Turtle reserved a table for 8 so we ate with them and two other couples. We estimated there were at least 200 people there and lots of food. We were stuffed. Great time.

We met lots of friends and made some new ones. Of course, it was good to see Salty Turtle again. They didn’t stay long. Vic is itching to get over to the Bahamas as soon as he can. Have fun! It was also fun to spend a little time with Roger and Lori from Reality before they header farther south. Tom and June from Lady Ella are here. We met them at the dock in Green Turtle Cay and have enjoyed seeing them. They may do the crossing when we do if they are ready.

Cathy and Earl from Seeker are here and we spend time with them. We got included in their Monday night Mr. Manatee burger deal night. Mr. Manatee is a waterfront restaurant that has cheap burgers on Monday. They also have a Mr. Manatee burger deal. The burger is a double cheeseburger with a slice of ham roll that looks like bologna, lettuce, tomato, bacon, and mozzarella sticks with a side of FF. If you can eat everything you get a free Mr. Manatee t-shirt. The nights we went, there were probably 25-30 boaters all telling boat tales at the same time. There was one guy that has perfected eating the big burger. He said it’s like filling a jar. You put in rocks and think it’s full until you add sand and think it can’t hold any more and then fill it with water until it is finally full. So… the rocks are the burgers, cheese sticks, ham roll and part of the fries, the sand is the tomatoes, lettuce, and the rest of the fries. Then the water is whatever you use to wash it down. He has over 20 shirts, so he must have it figured out.

Of course, we spent Christmas back home. We have a rental car and drove back to spend Christmas. We stayed with Shay’s mom and my dad. We got to see all our family and friends and had a great time.  My family got together at my dad’s, us and the kids got together at Shay’s moms Christmas morning and then his family got together that afternoon. We had way too much delicious food and lots of time together. It was just over too soon and we had to head back to the boat. This is a sad goodbye, since it will be several months before we get back. Lots of hugs, kisses and goodbyes.

Richard and Connie on their boat SeaSalt are back at their marina in Fort Pierce; we spent lots of time with them and had a great time as always. Emma and David on Five Flip Flops or FFF got back from their 6 months of trekking. They are getting FFF ready for 6 months of cruising.  We had many cheap MCD meals with them. We celebrated Richard’s and Emma’s birthday together again at Bobby’s house. And we welcomed in the New Year at Bobby’s with FFF and SeaSalt with Connie’s “ham junk” which is ham and black eyed peas. Yum!

Shay’s cousin and his girlfriend visited from the east coast of FL. They had a tour of the boat and enjoyed hearing some of our boating stories. Sam is interested in a boat, so after lunch on the boat they took the dinghy for a mooring field ride to check out the other boats.

Our good friends from Mt. Airy, Susan and Moses, visited us and spent a few nights on Escape. They have just returned from a cruise on a big boat and came to see us, since they were in the area. We had a great time catching up, taking long walks and just relaxing.  Wish they could stay longer but all good things must come to an end.

Margaret and Ken are back on Rocking B and are working very hard to get ready to head to the Bahamas.

We have decided to go to the Bahamas, again. So we fill up with diesel, water, and provisions. I have been slowly stocking up with things when they were on sale, but I guess I’ll get if even if it’s not “on offer”. That’s FFF term for being on sale. My inside refrigerator is full of all kinds of goodies and the freezer is full of meat. We’ve even got stuff in the small outside refrigerator too. Our credit card is wondering what's going on. We have bought so much stuff! But thank goodness, we won't be using it when we get to Bahamas, so it can recuperate.

As you know, we have been looking for a weather window and it looks like we will have a good one for several days starting January 19^th. We need to be in Lake Worth and it will take us 2 days to get there. One day to Hobe Sound and one day to Lake Worth. So, our plan is leave here Tuesday, January 17th, Wednesday  January 18th get to Lake Worth, then Thursday  January 19th head out.

Rocking B is not traveling with us, they need another day or two to finish projects. SeaSalt is not leaving with us either since they have things going on in a couple of weeks. So it looks like FFF and Escape will be heading out soon.

We’ve enjoyed Vero Beach and are looking forward to spending a few months in the beautiful Bahamas.

Since I am posting this from the Bahamas and the internet is not great, I will post pictures later. Just wanted to let you know what’s going on.