Today was Day 1 of our Florida Keys shakedown cruise, so here are our stats:
Statute Miles Traveled: 59.6
Time Underway: 8 hours 5 minutes
Average Speed: 7.9 knots (about 8 1/2 miles per hour)
Last night Dave Arnold came by to give us our bill for all his work during the last 5 weeks. Boy, were we surprised: It was about half as much as Bob expected! Now when is the last time that happened? We think Dave did great work for us, and his price was more than fair.
So, at 8:01 this morning we slipped our lines, left Harbour Isle Marina in Fort Pierce and headed south. The first 20 miles re-traced our steps from our first trip with Captain Chris, bringing the boat up to Ft Pierce from Stuart the day we closed on the boat purchase. That seems like ages ago.
The next 4o miles was all new territory, and quite different from the parts of the Intracoastal we’ve seen previously. The waterway was much narrower, and in many stretches not much more then twice as wide as the dredged channel.
We thought that we’d seen fancy homes earlier on our trial runs, but we passed some REAL mansions today. These were fairly typical, but not even close to the biggest or fanciest.
We began to experience one of the signature characteristics of the ICW today as well. We passed under about 15 bridges, many of which were low enough that they had to be opened to let us pass with our 20’ air draft. We understand that tomorrow on our 35 mile trip to Ft Lauderdale we will pass under many more.
We’re anchored out for the night just south of the Lantana Bridge in Lantana, Florida, about 10 miles south of West Palm Beach. The dot in the cove southwest of the bridge in the photo below is us.
The restaurant just north of where we’re anchored is served by a party barge from somewhere (see lime green in the photo above). The write ups about this anchorage say we’ll have music most of the evening!?
A successful first day! (p.s. and it was Bob who drafted this post and wrote all those exclamation points. CR)
No comments:
Post a Comment