December 11 13 Daytona Beach to New Smyrna and Two Lay Days There Only 16 Miles

It took only three hours with a fifteen minute delay at a bridge near our destination that opens only every twenty minutes. Cold but clear with more wind than yesterday so we used only the small jib. We passed the Ponce de Leon Inlet with its distinctive lighthouse by the sea.

There were alternate buoyed routes at two points in this short passage and we took the one officially marked as the "ICW route" which was inland from the light. The last time I was here was crewing on a northbound 74 foot motor yacht, m/v "Sea Leaf," in 2012. Then we stopped at a marina by the light before jumping out into the Atlantic for a romp up to Beaufort NC.
Today we could have gone another 32 miles to Titusville, but we broke the trip there from Daytona into two parts by stopping here because Lene heard or read that New Smyrna is a nice town.  This has emerged as our plan for the winter: We are going south in Florida slowly. We are already in Florida but have several hundred miles to get to the Dry Tortugas, which is as far as one can go in the U.S.  This involves a lot of the ICW because many of the ports are not easily accessible from the sea. The two hops from Lake Worth to Fort Lauderdale and from there to Miami Beach, will be out in the Atlantic, during good weather, because of bridges. There are so many bridges that you have to wait for in the first such hop and a fixed 56 foot bridge in the second that we just can not ever get under. And the trip in the Keys is planned as a mix of inside and outside jumps. Having stopped almost everywhere in Florida on our way south, we plan to skip a lot of these same stops on the way north by going outside. A plan that has sort of come to us and like all plans is waiting to be changed.
Anyway New Smyrna is a very nice cozy well run, friendly municipal marina with good showers but mediocre wifi.

We are at the furthest out slip, which, given how small this place is, was not a disadvantage. In fact it was an advantage because we had a clear unobstructed view of the Christmas Parade of lighted boats on Saturday night from our cockpit. About 20 boats, both power and sail, decked out in vastly colorful lights came up the ICW right past our cockpit. The photos do not do the spectacle justice.
They have a decent history museum here run by the historical society with interesting local artifacts such as the equipment used to cut "cats faces" (shallow "V" shaped slashes) on pine trees to collect the sap to make turpentine. The town got its name from the home town of the founders wife in Greece. The Marina is in the background, two blocks from the museum and between them is a 20 foot high plateau

on which is the ruins of the foundation of either the home that was shelled and burned in a naval bombardment from two US gunboats during the Civil War or a fort. The signage was more directed against vandalism than providing information. The museum has a copy (or original of an affidavit signed by a survivor, after the war, in support of a claim for reparations, asserting that no member of the family lifted arms in support of the Confederacy. I was interested in how the legal form of the affidavit has been relatively unchanged from then to today.
One thing I forgot to report from the museums in St. Augustine is that during the civil war, excluding the native Americans, the total population of Florida was less than 10,000, more than half of them slaves. But you cant believe all you learn in museums: In Fernandina I was told that the original native Americans here were a peaceable and matriarchal society; in St Augustine the story was about the chiefs and the wars between them. Because we can not talk to them directly anymore, each historian draws his or her own conclusions.
The main drag on this half of town, west of the ICW, is called Canal Street,

about six blocks long. We had dinner one night at Yellow Dog Eats on that street, which specializes in variations on pulled pawk. Saturday the street was closed for an antique and classic car show. My friend Jim would have loved the car show. Meticulously maintained and highly shined cars from the 30s through the 70s simply parked on the street, with their owners in lawn chairs nearby to answer questions. Some pride themselves on all original components while others have replaced the interior mechanicals with more powerful and efficient engines.
We took the shuttle bus that picked us up at the far end of Canal Street at Dixie Highway and took us to the beach.

The fare is $0.75 one way for a senior. After a stroll on the beach, we walked the two plus miles back through the main drag of the beach side of town, Flagler Street, and across the bridge that detained us on our passage into town.

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April 4 Titusville to Rockhouse Creek New Smyrna 31 2 Miles

Well the good news is that apparently felines have short memories. So Witty is not a permanent victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but his old pesky self. It was Saturday, the day before Easter, and warm and sunny so EVERYONE was out on the water. We saw hundreds of boats from Stand Up Paddleboards, to kayaks and canoes,

to fishing boats of all sizes,

to what I call motorized rafts.

And people were wading and swimming in the ICW too.

I put out the genoa and later the small jib but the wind was too close to our bow much of the time and too erratic. Anchor to anchor from 9:30 to 3:00. Only two opening bridges, one on request and the other every twenty minutes, which we made easily. The tide helped us the last third of our passage, except the last mile, once we got to Ponce de Leon Inlet, and we turned down the engine to near idle speed to give the watermaker two hours to make water before we arrived. We passed some nice modest waterfront houses

and some waterfront trailer parks also known as fishing camps....I think.

Rockhouse Creek runs east-west, connecting two  N-S waterways. (It is the horizontal in an "H".) When we arrived it was very crowded with perhaps fifty small boats and a few large ones. Folks had gone to the beach. We can only enter from the ICW, western end because it gets too shallow for us at the other end, but many powerboat people think that circumnavigating the unnamed island that forms its south side is a nice trip. We heard five of them comment on ILENEs name as they passed us. We had dropped anchor and settled in and by six p.m. there were only three boats left (one other sail and a trawler)

and we were too close to the sailboat, especially because there was so much room everywhere else and strong winds from the east were expected. So we picked up and dropped 150 feet further away from that sailboat. Our other neighbors were a family of campers.

There was no one on the other side of us, where we would turn right and be back in the ICW.

Im having trouble with the new snubber hook, (as well as the underline function) specifically in getting it to stay hooked onto the anchor chain; it falls off and dangles uselessly under the boat instead of doing its job. I tried tying it on but this wasnt working well so I next tried wrapping one side of the hook with rubbery tape to narrow the slot into which the chain sits, but that fell off. 

Here in Rockhouse, I knew it had fallen off when the wind came up at night: the chain took the load instead of the snubber and when ILENE hunted from side to side, the anchor chain snaps over in the bow roller making a sound like the boat is being pounded by a sledge hammer.

I created a way to mount the red and green dinghy navigation light using a suction cup, a piece of scrap plexiglass, a nut, some washers and a piece of thin line.

We have been noticing that Florida has given nicknames to its geography much as in Manhattan, neighborhoods like SOHO and Tribeca that have no legal or governmental significance  are used to define neighborhoods. The southern part of Florida: Miami, Fort Lauderdale and maybe Boca is called the Gold Coast. Heading north, next comes the Treasure Coast including Palm Springs, Stuart and Fort Pierce, so named because Spanish treasure galleons sank off this part of Florida. Cocoa, Titusville and New Smyrna are called the Space Coast. I hadnt noticed this before.

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December 14 15 New Smyrna Beach to Titusville and First of Three Lay Days There With Car 35 Miles

Motoring in the ICW is not a peak experience. During this trip and while at Titusville, there was almost no wind. It was sunny and not as cold. I put up a head sail for about an hour but then the wind was gone again. Companions make it more interesting. These guys, from New England, said that they were in training for the spring racing season and wanted to be on our "wake". They kept up with us, motoring at 5.7 knots, for about half an hour before turning back. They said "Were your dolphins!"

We also saw more dolphins than ever before, in small and large pods, close to a hundred total, during the five hours we were underway.

In Titusville one simply takes an available mooring and then calls the Marina to tell them the number. The Indian River is as much as three miles wide but with a depth of only one to six feet, except for the ICW channel with twelve feet depth that is perhaps 50 yards wide. Near Titusville the river has a piece that is seven or eight feet deep and several hundred yards wide. This is the anchorage and mooring field. We took a mooring near the ICW and near the outer end of the private marked channel leading from the ICW to a large marina with many slips that was dredged in the western (mainland) side of the River. The chart showed three low bridges, one shortly before we arrived and two further south. The first is for a railroad and is apparently open unless a train comes. The second was replaced by a beautiful new high expensive bridge, shown here from ILENE at sunrise,

and so only the third requires us to request an opening. I think they made a mistake in deciding which of the two car bridges to replace: the high one leads to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and is little trafficked. The remaining low automobile bridge also leads to the Kennedy National Space Center at Cape Canaveral and has a lot of cars and buses to be detained. Id be interested in what local politics caused the decision to replace the wrong bridge.
We took both our dinghy lights (so others can see us) and our flashlight (so we could see the unlighted channel markers and find our way home after dark). We had some wine on Autumn Borne with Dean and Susan. They are planning to haul, do their bottom and visit relatives back in Buffalo and will catch up with us later on. Also aboard were the crew of Seeker, Earl and Kathy, and friends who sail but live in Florida and did not have their boat here: Eric, an engineering colleague of Dean, and Joyce, a biker and tennis player, from Holland. When Erik and Joyce had to leave, the rest of us had dinner at Crackerjack, by the foot of that new bridge.
Next day was the first of our three with a rental car. After breakfast out we went to the Kennedy Space Center. We took the bus ride out along the path that the mammoth mover travels carrying the rockets (at one mph), and saw about four videos, each in its own theater, walked through a lot of objects, large and small and heard a great talk by former astronaut Don Thomas, who made four shuttle flights, the highlight of the day, actually.

Each stripe in the flag is eight feet wide!

Lift off!

End of Stage Two, with me, below, to give a sense of scale

Lene by capsule, looking lovely, as usual
.

The Rocket Garden

We were there from 10 to 4 and were quite tired by the end of it. We have access to a movie house here and Interstellar was playing but no, a quiet evening aboard.
The Space Center is operated entirely without government support, it brags: But taxpayers pay for it. Driving there for two seniors includes a $10 parking fee and $97.00 admission. it was not as expensive 25 years ago when I was here last.

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April 5 Rockhouse Creek New Smyrna to St Augustine 54 7 Miles

9:45 to 7:45 -- a long day, longer than planned. Our plan had been to go to the anchorage by Fort Matanzas on the Matanzas River, only 42.3 miles to break todays trip into two legs. The various sources we use: Skipper Bob, Doyle and Active Captain, have different ideas about how best to enter this anchorage. They all involve turning east into the Matanzas from the ICW but some are crowd sourced and some say to make the turn just south of green buoy 81A while others said to make the turn north of that buoy, and there is a discussion that the sands shift. We turned in just south and went from 12 feet of water to hitting the sandy bottom within 20 feet. Whump! Naturally, in such chancy circumstances we were going slow, as slow as the current in the ICW would allow. But if we had not been making some speed the current would have pushed us backward when we turned. We were able to back off in perhaps 15 seconds. But now we knew that we did not know how to get in there, though we saw another boat anchored within. So this episode took the bloom off the Matanzas anchorage rose and we motored the remaining miles 12.4 miles that we had planned to do the next day, to the Municipal Marinas mooring field in St. Augustine.

The waters were as vacant during this Easter Sunday passage as they had been crowded with people and boats the day before. This may have had something to do with the weather. It did not rain, but all day the meteorologists predicted rain and the skies looked like they were planning to let loose. It was reasonably warm until late afternoon. In the morning the winds were quite strong, gusting to 20 knots, so we flew the small jib while motoring and made more than seven knots. Later we made such speed when favored by the tide but only 4.8 knots when it flowed against us. Someones idea of an unusual waterside home:

It was a bit foggy, misty lets say,  toward the end, diminishing visibility of "the next buoy" which is our holy grail. This reminded me of how dependent I am on the most primitive navigation device we have: the human eye. But the mild fog in the mooring field is what permitted me to capture the loom of the Saint Augustine Lighthouse (one white flash every 30 seconds) at dusk.

We were visited buy a pack of four Porpoises, which swam against our boat on its mooring, probably seeking to eat seaweed growing on our hull, which reminds me she needs a cleaning.  Ilene believes they sensed our cats and wanted to make friends.

We plan to use our dink to run errands and for sightseeing tomorrow, and the launch, which only runs only once per two hours from 10 a.m to 6 p.m., on Tuesday and Wednesday, when the dink will be repaired. Weather permitting, we will sail, outside, to Cumberland Island by the St. Marys River on Thursday. less than 60 miles and ILENEs first sail since Miami to Fort Lauderdale.

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