Weather Stops Us

It's Saturday evening and we are at home, but the boat is in Vero Beach. We had a beautiful start to the day on friday. At 8am, we weighed anchor and headed north on the ICW. We missed the first bridge opening by 3 minutes and had to sit and wait for 27 minutes until the next opening. About 1 mile north of that, we got to a bridge 15 minutes early, but they were working on the bridge and it didn't open for that scheduled opening and we had to wait there for 45 minutes. It's pretty disheartening to be underway for 2 hours and only have gone 2 miles.

From then on, we made pretty good time. Our goal for the day was Vero Beach Marina where we planned to get fuel and then continue on north on Saturday morning. Shortly after we passed through Ft. Pierce, we hit a strong head current that slowed us down to around 5 knots and then the wind picked up to over 25 mph on the nose and we were slowed to 4.5 knots.

So, we arrived at Vero around 6:30pm, tied up to the fuel dock for the night and made plans for leaving the boat there on a mooring. The weather for the next 2-3 days is for 20-30 knot winds out of the N-NE, which would be on the nose and intermittent showers. We decided that we just didn't want to spend the last 2 days of Jan's vacation in that weather.

The boat will be there for the next 2 and 1/2 weeks while I go to work in Talledega and Richmond. I'll go back and get it and bring it back over a 2 day period.

We're both very tired. We pushed harder on the trip back than I would have preferred, but the weather that held us up in Key West, put us a day behind. I think we'll make sure that our trips in the future are not so 'far reaching' if we don't have more time.

I'll post photos from the SLR camera tomorrow of the trip. I lost all my photos off of my camera phone. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it goes. My phone was back from Sony Ericsson when I got back here today. That's 8 day turn around from the day I sent it from Key West until I had it back. All work was done under warranty. Sony Ericsson's customer service is top notch.