January 26
So I haven’t updated in a really long time but I probably won’t write everything from the whole 15 days that I didn’t post. The rest of the time we were in Titusville was fairly uneventful. We mostly just went around town and hung around relaxing. On the last day that we were there we got to see Candace again and she brought us (excluding my dad, unfortunately) to the mall and to Ron Jon’s Surf Shop in CoCo beach. That store is amazing! They have 2 levels full of everything you can imagine pertaining to surfing, or the beach or anything like that. After the shop we went down to the beach and James and I got to play in the sand and wake! It was so much fun and it was so nice to be able to have our toes in the sand.
The next day we left and stayed a night at a mooring in Vero Beach. Moorings are wonderful! All we had to do is grab the boat hook and pick up a line that tied to the deck. Then we put another line on the other side of the bow to keep us from swinging too much. I suppose it would be a bit harder in worse conditions, but it is still easier than anchoring. The next night we stopped to get gas in Lake Worth, just south of Palm Beach. We tried calling the dockhand on the radio and could see him in the building but as soon as we pulled in to the dock he was gone. So we weren’t able to get gas but we stayed there for a few hours, had dinner and cleaned up in preparation for an overnight sail. I ended up sleeping most of the way but when I woke up we were a few miles off the coast of sunny Miami. The water was the most beautiful, impossible, clear shade of blue! We kept sailing until we got to north Key Largo and stopped to get gas, then continued on until we got to our marina.
The past week or so we’ve been mostly just relaxing and getting settled in. We went to the state park a couple times, which was ok. The beaches definitely aren’t sandy like you would expect but it was nice to be in the sun and warmth. We also found a publix and the public library, where we found a free SAT prep book that I’ve been working on. We met up with my dad’s friend Hal who was here on a dive trip with other people from New England. That was nice especially since he had a car so we were able to venture further than our bikes allow. One night we went down to Islamorada and that was nice. We went to a sports store and got to see a sister ship to Ernest Hemingway’s boat. We also bought Old Man and the Sea, which James is reading now. That night we also went to a very yummy Cuban restaurant, which I can’t wait to go back to. Yesterday when we went to the beach I went in the water for the first time. I snorkeled with my dad and James on a ‘ship wreck’ at the state park consisting of 14 cannons and an anchor as well as ballast stones, all set up to look as if a Spanish Galleon had sunk right there in the harbor and all the wood had decomposed leaving the iron parts. There is a pool down the street which we want to visit as soon as it gets nice enough to go swimming. It’s been a bit cloudy and rainy the past few days. Although, I suppose that’s a good thing considering it gives us time to do chores. We decided that we want to keep the boat here until we come back in April, but we may still hop around to a few other keys while we’re here. We also found out today that there is a bus that runs the length of the keys, so that will be nice in order to get to other keys for the day without taking the boat there.
