Almost There!!!

We finally pulled ourselves away from the dolphin show in Eau Gallie, and made our way to Vero Beach – a pretty straightforward and uneventful trip. Didn’t even have any low bridges to deal with! Then, as we were pulling into the mooring field, I glanced behind us and saw something long and very dark swimming in the water…snake I was pretty sure. After a bit of Googling (is that a real word now?), I’m pretty confident it was an adult water moccasin. Yikes! I like my wildlife spottings, but snakes, not so much.

Vero was different, but I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me say that. Maybe it was the free buses that ran every hour, maybe it was the fact that we looked like teenagers compared to the majority of the folks we saw, maybe it was the mall where half the stores were vacant and several were closed simply because it was Monday…I just don’t know. (For the record…I can’t remember the last time I was in an indoor mall, so maybe they are a dying breed?) Apparently, however, Vero Beach is also affectionately known as Velcro Beach since so many people who stop there on their boats never seem to leave, but fortunately, we were able to pull ourselves away after only two nights.

We were still trying to make our way to Lake Worth where we would be staging to cross over to the Bahamas, but it was too far to make in one day so we stopped for the night in Peck Lake. We got there early enough in the day that we were able to dinghy to Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge on Jupiter Island and do some beach combing. We had the beach entirely to ourselves. Bliss! There weren’t a whole lot of shells to be found, but we had our first sea bean finds here. These things are sooo cool! I’d heard of them, but we’d never found any, and now we found seven! I don’t know a whole lot about these things, but I’m certainly on the lookout for more now!

The next day we were finally going to make it to North Palm Beach on Lake Worth, which is where we would sit and wait for the right weather for crossing the Gulf Stream! This was another frustrating bridge kinda day with three bridges that only opened at certain times, so even though we were so eager to reach Lake Worth, we had to travel slower than usual in order to time our arrival at each bridge to coincide with their openings. Ugh. In other news…we crossed mile marker 1000 (and eventually mile marker 1010 as well) on the ICW today! And, we anchored in Lake Worth….next stop the Bahamas!!!!