Day 7-A long day to Daytona

Friday, March 26, 2021.
Weather: Temp: 83/71, Humidity: 95/60%, Top Wind: SE14 mph, Precip: None, Miles Traveled: 67

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We tried to get reservations at New Smyrna Beach Marina, but they had a boat club coming in for the whole weekend, not no space for us. There are other marinas in New Smyrna, but when looking at the weather forecast, it looked like Saturday afternoon could be windier than Friday afternoon. So….. we decided to press on and go farther on Friday, and make a shorter trip on Saturday, to try to take advantage of the possibilities of less wind. Rather than 52 miles to New Smyrna Beach, we went 67 miles to Halifax Harbor Marina in Daytona Beach. We’ve never been here before, and the marina gets really good reviews on Active Captain. (That is a user based review system that includes a lot of feedback on all kinds of things along the waterways. Kind of like TripAdvisor, only it’s very specific to waterway travel). All that to say, we got up WAAAY before the sunshine today! 🤨🌙. Like 6:00 early! Shheesh! Our plan was to leave Cocoa Village Marina before sunrise, as soon as there was light enough to see the channel. 67 miles doesn’t sound like much, but there are a lot of no-wake zones along the way, so our average speed today was less than 9mph. We thought it would take us at least 8, maybe 9 hours to get to our destination, so we wanted to leave as early as possible. That would help avoid some of the late afternoon winds, we hoped. But in the meantime…. we now have rocket fuel on board in our little red rocket! When we looked for a single serve coffee machine, the least expensive one we found was red. So – why not?!

We cast off our lines about a half hour before sunrise and it was plenty light enough to see where we were going. And our silly 80 year old neighbors were up and wished us well as we pulled away from the dock. WHY in the world were they up so early?! 🤷‍♀️. I may never understand morning people! 🤔 I do have some of them in my life that I love very much, but there aren’t any in our immediate family. We Starks are night owls, for sure! We can do mornings if we have to, but it is not in our default DNA settings.

Here is the view from the helm. Yep, the windows would not stay clear, as it was apparently dew point outside…. for like four hours after we left the dock!!

This is looking east over the big bridge that we rode our bikes over yesterday. Such a beautiful morning!

This is the marina as we meandered into the ICW. It’s not overly protected from the elements, but we had a very peaceful couple of nights there. And the town of Cocoa Village is really quaint and nice.

At 7:23, the sunshine finally showed her smiling face! 🌞

As we motored north, we saw this Florida Power & Light Cape Canaveral power plant. Apparently it is powered by U.S. sourced natural gas. I’m a native Pacific Northwest girl, where hydro-power is the norm. I’m always curious how the rest of the world makes electricity.

Here is our track today. The yellow shows were we went fast for about 15 minutes, just to exercise the turbos. Hey! And that is when the windows finally cleared up from all the condensation/dew! Yes- it really took that long. Must I say, that it was a humid day, all day long! For some reason, I think Florida is gearing up for summer already.
Then we made a jog to the east to go through “Haulover Canal”.

Here is the canal – it was full of people fishing. On one of the islands, I saw some big pink birds and I even saw one flying, but couldn’t get a good picture. To see a big pink bird flying is sooo amazing, it just doesn’t seem normal. They are roseate spoonbills, and are very pink!

After we got through the canal, it was after 10:00, and our bellies were hollerin for some food. Down to the galley I went to fix breakfast on the go, ala Island Girl. This works great! With our power inverter, I can use everything in the kitchen (one appliance at a time) except the stove. So…. toast an english muffin, and slather with butter. (This is the captain’s breakfast, by the way.). Cook some egg-beaters in a small bowl in the microwave, which happens to be the perfect size to fit on a muffin. Heat up a frozen sausage patty. Pile them all together with a slice of cheddar, and voila! A breakfast samich! Works good with hamburger buns too, because sometimes you just have some of those hanging around that you don’t know what to do with. For those of you without an inverter… sorry!

After the haulout canal, we entered a fairly narrow channel area, with a lot of mobile homes and RVs, and boat launches and pontoon boats. There was a very long no-wake zone, and we saw lots of pontoon boats and little fishing boats out tootling around looking for today’s catch.

We saw lots and LOTS of white butterflies. I can’t believe that I actually caught one in a picture! They flittered all around us for a couple of hours in this channel.

This was a cool house. It was built of stone, and had a scalloped roof line. And it was really big! It kind of reminded me of some of the unique homes we saw in Charlevoix Michigan.

There were several sand bars, and there were little boats beached everywhere, enjoying the beautiful weather.

This was entering New Smyrna. The marina we wanted to stay in was just after this bridge to the left. But we continued off to the right.

And there, we found some nice homes. There was a lot of boat activity in the New Smyrna area, (plus and minus about five miles). Most of the day had been pretty calm. At least here, it was a no-wake zone, so boats couldn’t be too crazy!

Beyond New Smyrna, the ICW peels off to the left/inland, while the Ponce Inlet goes out into the Atlantic. We were getting a nice pull with the outgoing tide as we approached the inlet. After we peeled off, we slowed WAAAY down – like from 10mph to 6.5. Darn current, anyway. It’s nice when it’s going with you, but then it was like we were paddling upriver! As we proceeded north, we spied the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse across the mangroves to the east. It is 175 feet tall, making it the tallest in the state of Florida.

We finally made it to Halifax Harbour Marina in Daytona. It is quite a large marina, and the staff here are very nice and helpful. We found our slip pretty easily, as each dock was well labeled. The wind was a bit breezy, and we saw that the finger piers that we were going to were at least 45’ long. So rather than try to stern into the slip, and into the wind, Captain powered into the wind and slip bow first. It was flawless, and we got all tied up in no time. One of my bow lines was an absolute disaster, all coiled up and twisted. I have no idea what happened- I pulled it off of the rail just like I always do, but it was a total hairbrain mess. Thankfully, the dockhand just laughed and it was no big deal. You’d think I was new at this or something! 🤭

Kenny had ordered a prescription from Walgreens, so we went for a walk into town. It is a nice little beach town, and it is apparent that there is a lot of work being done to beautify the riverfront. It is still under construction, but it looks like it is going to be really very nice when they’re done!

We’ll go under this bridge tomorrow morning.

I just thought this was cute. It was at a juice bar.

This was the walkway along Beach Street, where we spied a bourbon bar that was closed and for sale, with a “206” area code phone number. We might be the only people around that recognized that as a Seattle area code! HA! Too bad they didn’t make it and the business/building was for sale. Right next door to that was a cigar lounge that was open, even with tables and chairs out on this big sidewalk, with cigars puffing away!

And then we found McK’s pub a couple doors down. We stopped in for some refreshment.

Since it was an Irish pub, Kenny went for a black and tan beer.

And I was pleasantly surprised that they had an apple pie cider… from Cigar City in Tampa! It was good.

We tootled back to the boat and I fixed french dip sandwiches with deli roast beef that we picked up yesterday on our bike ride, and smoked gouda cheese. YUM! 😋
And the sunset was just about as pretty as the sunrise. The sunrise sorta seems more impressive; mostly because we were actually up to see it, bringing on the promise of a new day. But I think I prefer sunsets. They are so relaxing and calming as another beautiful gift of a day winds down into a gentle, sleepy ahhhhhh.

Tomorrow we have a short 3 hour day to Palm Coast, and we are so excited that we’ll get to see some friends that we’ve known for nearly 30 years from back home in Puyallup Washington. They too are Floridians now, but we haven’t seen them for a few years. It should be a fun day.