Monday May 16, we were up at 7:00 (with the help of an annoying alarm clock on my phone) so that we could get on our way. We were docked right above the lock, so we could be ready to go when we wanted, or we could catch a lock through if somebody else showed up. The lock opened for the days business at 7:00. We were puttering around making coffee, turned on the radio, and at about 7:30 heard someone eastbound calling the lock, with no response. Hmmm. We figured we better get set to go, and then we saw the eastbound boat show up coming down the river. So we called the lock too, and we didn’t get a response, either. Our neighbor in the Pilgrim boat Dancing Bears, (which IS the old HMS Vagabond that we knew!!) was getting ready too. We finally got the lockmaster to respond, and he told us to call again when we were off the dock and waiting. OK, so three minutes later, we called him again. 😏 THEN he said he needed to reset the lock, so it would be 15-20 minutes (it’s a 12 foot exchange of water). WHAT?! There was already a boat here waiting?! Why did he need US to be off the dock and floating before he would start?! Sheesh!
We finally all got into the lock, and did everything the lockmaster’s way (he has HIS way and he finally got everyone to follow instructions and all the ducks in a row.) It was a nice easy ride down. Going down in the lock is way easier than going up! We were the lead boat, and we were out and on our way by 8:45. The bad part about that timing was that there is a bridge in Stuart that only opens on request on the hour and the half hour. It was seven miles away with a lot of no-wake zones. The white boat behind us put the pedal to the metal any place that he could, and he made it to the bridge for the 9:30 opening. We were about 1.5 miles away from the bridge at 9:20, in a long no-wake zone, so we couldn’t get there in time. When we did get to the bridge, we called to queue up for the 10:00 opening, and just treaded water for about 20 minutes. So did Dancing Bears. Thankfully the wind wasn’t blowing and it wasn’t difficult or stressful to just sit.
Once we were through the bridge, we stopped in Stuart at the Harborage Marina (formerly Loggerhead) to get some fuel. It was one of the least expensive options on this coast ($5.26 + tax), and we know the navigation in and out of it, so it was easy. We wanted to make sure we have enough fuel on board when Island Girl gets to Victoria BC that we don’t have to fuel her in Canada at THEIR fuel prices! Finally just after 11:00am, we made it to the Atlantic ICW and turned south. We’ve only been this way once before when we went to the Bahamas in March of 2017.
As we were approaching the Jupiter inlet, there were lots of people and little boats beached along this Nature Preserve. It looked like fun!
Here is a nice picture of the Jupiter Lighthouse.
We saw so many mansions, it was hard to pick which ones to take pictures of!
We were watching the weather, and there was a thunderstorm forecasted for around 3:30. We kept watching our GPS arrival time and hoped we would make it into our marina before it hit. I had reservations at Safe Harbor New Port Cove in Lake Worth. It is a pretty small marina, and I hoped the current and wind would be manageable. In 2017, we stayed at Riviera Beach Marina which is HUGE, and the current was kind of a bear when we were there. Kenny doesn’t have fond memories of this area. But – we found our marina, easy approach, and they put us on a floating dock. Two dock-hands came out to give us some help, because the wind that preceeds the thunderstorm was already here, and it was really blowing us off of the dock. Between the guys with big muscles and Kenny working the bow thruster and engines, they muscled us in and got us all tied up. WHEW! Thankfully the rain didn’t actually hit us until about 4:30, but then it poured!
It rained really hard for a couple of hours, and there was plenty of fireworks and noise in the clouds! Sooooo glad we were already here and tied up! Thankfully we didn’t have any plans to do anything here, just hang out on the boat and bug out in the morning to continue our journey, so we stayed inside nice and dry.
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Tuesday May 17, we got up and on our way about 8:30. We were going to have a long day of about 42 miles and six bridges that we would need to request openings for. It was a beautiful morning as we tootled away from New Port Cove.
The Lake Worth inlet channel to the Atlantic Ocean is a big, deep and safe inlet to transit. With that comes beautifully clear water! Just look at how pretty this water is!! It felt like we were in the Bahamas – the water was 15′ deep and we could see the bottom clearly.
With the inlet being big and deep, there are a LOT of LARGE yachts in Lake Worth. The “little” one going down the marina channel (white stern going away from us) came across the ICW in front of us. It was about 85-100′, and it looks like a baby compared to the mega yachts!
This was the first bridge that we had to request an opening for. It opens on the :15 and :45, but only if requested. We heard several boaters throughout the day asking various bridges why they didn’t open on the “scheduled” time, and the bridge tenders always came back and said that you must contact the bridge to request an opening. “But I’ve been sitting here waiting for the last 15 minutes”. And the bridge tenders keep explaining that they don’t know boaters intentions unless the boater contacts them, and the bridges only open at the scheduled times IF a boater needs to transit through. Anyway, five out of our six bridges today had scheduled times for opening, and only one was completely ‘opens on request’. The schedules are timed so that you can transit between them and generally not have to wait too long for an opening. At least that is the plan. Some are on the :00 & :30, some on the :15 & :45, and one was on the :00, :20, :40. Thank goodness we aren’t super tall, like 21′ or taller. If that was the case, we would have had to open sixteen bridges today. UGH!
The nice thing about Navionics on Gladys is that I can set a route to the next bridge, and it will calculate our arrival time. That was really handy! This Ocean Avenue Bridge was just cute – like a fairytale castle.
We saw so many more HUGE homes along the ICW, but this gave us a double take. This trailer park is on the east side of the ICW, so on the expensive barrier spit of land along the Atlantic Ocean. I joked that these were million dollar 1960’s vintage single wide trailers. (Some of them were certainly that old, but in nice shape.)
I quick looked at Zillow, and doggone if they aren’t quarter-of-a-million trailers!! Wow! And we all know that trailers don’t even own the land that they’re sitting on, but have to pay a lease for the land. Location, Location, Location!
This was cute. We’ve seen huge mansions, mobile homes, but this is really a very tiny house. (heehee!)
While we were waiting for a bridge to open, we saw Iguana-Don stroll by on the bulkhead. We don’t have any of these big guys around our house on the other side of the state. Thank goodness. I can deal with the quick little Gecko-Garys, but I don’t want these big guys crawling around on my stuff!
Some more beautiful ‘homes’? We wondered how many people live in most of these…. probably two?
Oh man – I wasn’t fast enough! If you look close, you can see Spiderman and Superman on the upper deck, and the Incredible Hulk down at the pool. There was somebody else upstairs too – maybe Captain America? I can’t remember. I hope everybody is OK in that house with all those superheros to the rescue!
Really? Just how extravagant must we be?!
We finally made it to our canal turn off. I had talked with Rob, our host, and he said that he would be at the house to help us with the gangplank and power hookup.
We pulled right in, Captain spun us around so that we’re bow out, and we got all tied up to the pilings. The tide was low, and we tied up fairly tight so that the ladder/gangplank could come across. Kenny tied the ladder to a post on land and then worked on getting our power to work. Rob had one 30amp and one 50amp outlet, but somehow with splitters, Kenny got it all to work so that we could have air conditioning on board. THANK GOODNESS! It was so hot and humid that I looked like I just got out of the shower. My face and back of my head sweat sooo bad in this kind of weather, that my hair was dripping.
And then…. Iguana-Don and Donna came to visit. OOOH, I hope they don’t come across the ladder! We don’t need reptiles on Island Girl!
This is our fancy set up. It’ll work OK, since we’re just staying here tonight. Tomorrow we’ll get stuff off-loaded then Island Girl can just float here and wait for us to come back. I really don’t trust my own balance, so I was a big chicken crossing this thing. I was so afraid that if I stepped on one side that it would flip! EEEK! But I had to get off tonight. One of Kenny’s friends/former co-workers happened to be in town for a national raquetball tournament, and asked if we could get together for a bit. Sure! I look fabulous! And I have our whole bathtub/shower filled up with stuff that I don’t want flying around the boat while she’s on her high seas adventure. Oh well! Jim and his wife came by and picked us up, and we went to a nearby bar for a beverage. We had a really fun time and laughed a lot. His wife is from England and she had some fab tales about her home, mum, and mates in England. After a couple of hours, they brought us back and I fixed something super easy for dinner. Then I packed a bunch of stuff into a couple of boxes to minimize projectiles in case the AAL GENOA takes Island Girl through a hurricane. 😳
We arrived at a negative low tide of -0.67. As we were watching TV in the evening, I got off my couch spot and stepped toward the galley. I kind of had gravity helping me over, and it felt like we leaning to the starboard side. Weird. Too much wine? I did the same thing about a half hour later, and it still felt like it, so I was thinking that maybe it wasn’t just me, so I told Kenny. He stood up and said – Yep, we are listing! Then he remembered that we really weren’t tied up the way he wanted for fluctuating tides, so we went out in the dark to make some adjustments. Sure enough, our stern line was caught low on the piling and was pulling our starboard side down. We had a heckofatime getting it loose, but finally did. Then Kenny retied all of our lines to spring back and forward correctly. Our problem was that we had tied tight to the piling right at our stern so that she wouldn’t move while we were using the ladder-gangplank to hook up the power. But then we forgot to fix it. I looked at the tide chart, and we were at high tide at 10:00pm, which was +3.34’. So we’d gone up 4’ since we arrived! I checked the tides for the next three weeks, and none of the swings will be this severe, so that’s good! Whew!
We felt a lot better once we fixed the lines, and we were super glad that we stayed here one night to get a bit of a feel for how she’ll do here. It’s a quiet channel with minimal watercraft activity. It’s far enough off of the ICW that there are no wakes from there, although the ICW has a bridge right there which means that it is a no-wake zone anyway, so that’s all good.
Wednesday we scheduled an Uber to come pick us up at 9:15 to take us to Fort Lauderdale airport to pick up a rental car. We got that accomplished, and then stopped at IHOP for some breakfast on the way back to the boat.
Rob’s house is in all kinds of disarray as he plans to remodel it. It really is a million dollar fixer-upper, so it is sad to see it in such a mess. But, I think the pilings, even though they look a bit rough, will be OK as long as we don’t have a hurricane. And since there is no dock, Iguana-Don and family can’t take up any shenanigans on board Island Girl while we’re away.
We took up the outside floor coverings, covered everything on the fly bridge, put the bikes inside, and taped up a bunch of cupboards and drawers to get ready for shipping. We off-loaded our clothes, food, and I took towels and bedding home to launder. We unhooked the power, and removed the gangplank, and there she is. I hope she’ll do OK!
The next time that we see her, we’ll be taking her about seven miles south the Port Everglades – the same location where cruise ships board! I told you that Island Girl was going on a Panama Canal cruise, right? Fortunately there is only one bridge that we need to open on that voyage, and it is right at the end of this canal on the ICW. That timing should be pretty easy to manage. We got an e-mail from Cross Chartering Yacht Transport today, and they’ve narrowed our ship’s ETA down to just two days, and her arrival in Victoria to two days. AAL GENOA’s ETA in Port Everglades is June 4-5, and her ETA in Victoria is June 24-25. We’ll see! I’ve learned not to hold my breath, and I’ll know it’s real when she’s finally loaded. Right now, the GENOA is enroute from Veracruz Mexico to New Orleans, and I don’t have any idea where she’ll go after that. But at least I can track her on a couple of different websites.
We headed home around 1:00 for our four hour drive. Now we need to figure out what to do for two weeks. It’s too hot and humid to enjoy doing much outside. A trip to Universal Studios or Disney World to take advantage of our annual passes might not be in the cards with this summer-like weather. We’ll see! Stay tuned. I’ll bring you updates as we get them, but we’re going to be pretty boring for a couple of weeks.