Firstly – HAPPY EASTER to everyone who reads our blogs!!
A few days ago it was a beautiful day – hot, sunny, cloudless and windless. So we thought we’d take Amadink for a little ride up the ICW and have lunch at a waterside restaurant just beyond the next bridge.
So we started with a short trip to have a look at the Tiki bar just south of us. We had had dinner there when we first arrived in Riviera Beach and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately there was no place for dinghies to tie up to so we moved on.
Back we went, past New Port Cove Marine Center where we are currently tied up and headed further north. Mary had inquired from the office about waterside bars and restaurants and was told that there was one just past the next bridge. Northwards we continued. Never mind that the next bridge was nowhere in sight!!! We’ll just get to the next bend/next small islet/next rock outcropping and then see. Well, after what seemed a long time there was still no bridge in sight!!!
Naturally, being in a protected marina on the protected ICW waters we hadn’t bothered to look at the charts an neither had we looked at the weather report!!
By the time we turned around, never having even seen the bridge, the wind had piped up considerably. I know that I had looked at Windfinder the day before and the report was for 10 knot winds.
I knew that the wind that we were now experiencing was way in excess of 10k coming from the south!!! The tide was also ebbing!! So we had a wind against tide effect. Now, those of you that have been reading this blog regularly will know that I have detailed the effects of wind against tide. Suffice it to say that we got WET returning back to our marina.
We did stop off in the lee of Peanut Island for a couple of hours where we dried off and baked in the sun and actually had a great time!
Returning to Amanzi we found that the next bridge was about 3 1/2 miles north of us and the wind report recorded 20, gusting 25, knots while windefinder was still forecasting 10-14!!!! Story of our whole trip!!
Since then we have been lazing around – cleaning the boat and getting some boat chores done.
We can’t believe that we’ll be winging our way home to New Zealand in 8 days time!!
Then it’ll be our youngest daughter, Shannon’s wedding. Guess I’ll have to prepare some kind of father of the bride speech in the next few days
2 April 2012 – A side trip off the ICW
On Thursday we decided it would be quite nice to have a bit of a break from the boat and do some land based sight seeing. So we hired a car and on Friday morning (after running a couple of errands) we headed north to Titusville.
As it was almost April 1st we thought it might be fun to keep Spot running on our travels. So for those of you who’ve been following us, you may have noticed that we seemed to be travelling over the land and ending each day at a land based location – this was our best attempt at an April Fools joke.
Anyway our first errand on Friday was to go Walmart and try and get our vehicle GPS replaced. We’d bought it in Walmart in Baltimore at the beginning of October but it was no longer working – it’s been safely stored in a drawer since then but perhaps somehow the sea air got to it!
No luck though – it was out of the warranty period – and as our second errand involved getting a new sim card for the ipad, which was also no longer working, we made a snappy choice and bought another Tom Tom. At least now we could get to where we were planning to go!
The next stop was at an amazing mall – The Gardens Mall. It was huge, with lots of flowers and water features. Of course it also had all the big names like Louis Vuitton. Another first for us was that it even had the Easter Bunny in a lovely butterfly garden and you could have photos taken with him/her- just like Father Christmas at home. I resisted though, just settling for a photo of the bunny.
We arrived at Titusville in the late afternoon and checked in to our hotel – all very nice with a convenient Denny’s on the premises.
These two nights were to be the first nights that Lance & I have slept in a bed, that doesn’t go up and down and sideways, since we moved onto Amanzi in early October. We were looking forward to some very restful sleep – no weather to worry about and no water to be heard lapping around the boat.
Estelle and Alastair were also looking forward to their bed – no climbing over each other to get in or out!
The Kennedy Space Center was fantastic – we enjoyed every minute of it and could probably have spent a lot longer than one day there. For me it has always been the Apollo program which stands out for me – I guess I was a very impressionable young girl back in 1969 when we listened to the first moon landing over the radio. Back in those days we had no TV in the very small town in Zimbabwe where we lived.
Yesterday we headed for Cocoa Beach and had a drink there in the beachfront bar. It was a perfect day.
As you can tell we just can’t stay too long away from the water and we then went to the upper reaches of the St Johns River and went for a air boat ride. It was excellent and we all enjoyed it very much. Mind you I’m not sure about what must be worse – doing a donut in an air boat in the alligator infested waters or doing a donut in front of the rocks on the jet boat rides that we get in New Zealand! (I’ve never been game enough to do that!)
We saw lots of alligators peeking out of the water and quite a bit of bird life. We even stopped to chat with some local fishermen out in the middle of the lily pond and they were more than happy to show off their catches to us.
Last night it was back to Riviera Beach and Amanzi. The weather has been perfect and very hot – the marina we’re in has a boat club and all 62 of its boats were out yesterday although they were apparently all caught in a big squall.
And oh yes – you’re probably wondering – did we sleep better on dry land? Unfortunately no – not really – it may be a while before we settle back in to a normal sleeping pattern.