A little this and that.....

We had a lot to do in a day...rest was not part of it.  Thanks to John & Sue, we accomplished what we needed to and had a good visit that was too short!!  We also got to visit with Andy Manzi, always a treat.  We left yesterday morning at 9am and made it to 'Velcro Beach' (in a thunderstorm thank you) at 5:00.  We circled the mooring field (in the ICW) waiting for the storm to go by. As always I was the one on the front deck trying to catch the mooring ball.  They have some serious upkeep issues here.  The line on the mooring ball was so full of barnacles it wouldn't slide on the hook.  After 2 tries I finally grabbed it and ended up with broken skin on my fingers from the barnacles.  Of course, I freaked out because we had just had a discussion at lunch with John and Andy about people getting water born bacterial infections.  So I immediately used a half bottle of alcohol (not the drinking kind mind you) and a good douse with Bacitracin!  Hopefully that got all the little devils.

You can see from this picture where the rope attached to the ball ends (the dark spot) and the barnacle encrustation begins.

Now that I have finished with today's update lets see if I can remember 4 days ago???

Travelling on the Intracoastal on Labor Day Weekend in Florida was a trip for sure.  Boats everywhere! Actually it made the days go by quickly....although we began to feel like Phillip & Elizabeth, waving to everyone that went by ( our water etiquette says you must wave to all, and we have ALWAYS followed that), we being the oddity a boat over 30 feet!  After not seeing a boat for mile after mile we were encouraged to find we had not been in the 'Twilight Zone' after all, there were other people left on earth!

The scenery was new.  I don't know what zone I could have been in before but I realized, I haven't seen any of this before.  That my friends, turns out to be going South versus going North.  Everything looks different seen from a different angle. So it was not a boring rehash of where we had been it was where we were going!  We saw everything from humble and funky....

To OVER THE TOP....and through all of our 3,200 miles (unbelievable at 7 mph) nobody and I mean nobody does over the top better than Florida!

We saw St. Augustine and Ponce Inlet Lights in an entire new light.  They again became new...sunshine and clear skies instead of haze.  Again, it is amazing the way the eye sees things.  They look totally different on a clear day...sharp and in focus.

A tug we saw on the way up the coast still had his laundry out, hopefully new laundry  and another house had added an awesome totem in the yard.  The barrier Islands of Florida are so beautiful and I feel very fortunate to have seen them up close and personal from the 'back door', always the most personal.

After making it through Mosquito Lagoon in a very stiff SW wind we saw foam on the water that looked like floating chunks of ice. I don't know what causes the foam must have something to do with rough salt water.  

 Traversing the ICW is hard work, especially above Mosquito Lagoon which is just north of Titusville.  The ICW is mostly a channel dredged in a large but very shallow body of water.  There appears to be plenty of water BUT don't stray out of the channel or you will be in 2-4 feet !  When there is a lot of traffic, as in Labor Day weekend in North Florida, all the boats and jet skis are in that little channel and it makes it HAIRY.  Some of the boats came whipping by so close to us that we just shook our heads in amazement.  So, we are thankful to once again be travelling with very little boat traffic.  We can only imagine what it is like in October when all the Cruisers start returning to Florida.