6 April 2015

We are back to leaving at 7AM, with sunrise at 7:15 or so, there is enough daylight to go. We can do our 30-35 miles and be at the next dock around lunch time. We motored out of Palm Beach past all of our new mega yacht friends and made the 7:15 AM bridge opening. We were on our way for another day.

There is a harbor north of West Palm Beach. The winds were from the east and we saw a container ship backing in dragging their anchor. I’ve heard of doing that to keep the speed down and help control the bow, but it was the first time I had seen it in action.

Lots of houses along the water again, but most of the boats were up on lifts to keep them out of the salt water. There were not any other bridges that we needed to wait for, but there were some tricky spots where there were sailboats stacked up waiting to get through.

Pretty soon the homes dwindle away and both sides are covered with mangroves. It gives more of a feeling of being on a river vs being on a big canal. Lots of wildlife, a number of trees with osprey nests in the tops of them (unless the bald eagles here are pretty small)

Only saw one looper today. They are from TN and they had come down from Stuart. They were going south a little farther then heading east for the 60 mile run to the islands. They have a pretty good weather window. They will stay for a month and then head north to the Chesapeake. They won’t do the Northern part of the loop until next year.

About 11AM we turned into the St. Lucie river and motored the 6 miles to Stuart. We are at Loggerhead Marina, on the north side of Stuart. A nice marina, full services, laundry, etc. The dock hands (Jim and Tim) were pretty helpful.

Lunch was at Wahoo’s, their happy hour starts at 11AM! So we had ½ priced drinks, a pound of mussels for $7 and crabcake sliders. Very nice place, good view of the water and a nice breeze. The kind of place you could stay all day.

But there were errands to do and laundry to take care of. So we spent our afternoon doing those and then it was back to the boat to figure out what the “smell” was.

When we had gotten back on the boat on Saturday there was a strange “plastic like” smell. We thought it was from the protective plastic mats they had put down when they had worked on the boat. But Sunday when we had run the AC it was strong. I thought it may be a problem with the AC. We opened up both sides and ran the AC, but there wasn’t any smell coming from the AC’s. We ran the AC a few mins and when we went down below, the smell was back. Turned the power to the AC off and I kept searching around for what it could be. No idea, but it was dinner time, back to Wahoo’s

We were low key, getting a trio of tacos, beef, chicken and pork. Another nice time on their deck, this time watching the sunset paint the sky with colors.

We have great internet here, so we streamed “Mad Men”. It’s the last season and the last 8 shows start this week, we are both huge fans.

Susan had heard from our friends on “Marabeel”, they are about 35 miles ahead of us. We should catch up to them in Daytona Beach at the MTOA spring meeting. It will be fun meeting up with them, we last saw them in Dunedin FL.