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.