March 30 April 2 Fort Pierce to Cocoa and Three Lay Days There 57 Miles

We left the fuel dock at 8 am and anchored at 4:45. Lots of miles but all high bridges except one which opened on request. We went past Vero Beach and Dragon Point, where we had stayed on our way south. This was just as pleasant a passage as the one to Fort Pierce had been ugly. The ICW is deeper, wider and straighter for the most part, and it was sunny and warmer.
A pod of porpoises looked us over while crossing close behind us; we havent seen them for a while. When the tide turned, slowing us from near seven knots to 6.2, the wind came up, just far enough off our starboard bow to allow the small jib to get that speed back for us. We had planned to go outside in the Atlantic to New Smyrna, but the problem with the sunken barge in the Fort Pierce Inlet coupled with winds out of the north made the decision to stay inside until New Smyrna for us -- three passages instead of one.

In the morning the tachometer was not working, nor the engine hour meter. I took off and cleaned the plexiglass cover that protects the panel and the panel itself and jiggled the wires. Jiggling sometimes helps such problems, but no luck today. Then Lene said she had trouble with the ignition switch when turning on the engine. Oh yes, she had accidentally turned it to "Off". After "Start" it should be left "On", but turning it "Off" does not stop the engine -- it only turns off the electricity to its instruments. Switched back to "On" and the tachometer was instantly restored to operation.

A big pleasant surprise when I heard a yell of  "Roger" and saw a dark blue motorized catamaran passing us.

"Its Phat Cat," came next. Dave and Diane, with their two cats aboard, passed us. They resigned from the Harlem and are currently on their last leg (northbound up the Atlantic coast) of the "Great Circle Cruise". They started up the Hudson, and then through canals to the Great Lakes and Canada, down Lake Michigan, the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee and other rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, through the ICW east and south along Floridas west coast to Marathon and then northbound in the Atlantic.  This is a trip for power boats; our mast would have to be taken down for the trip, and laid atop the boat, would extend ILENE from 43 feet long to over 65. Dave and Di have been on the journey for about ten months. Since Marathon, they have been in many of the same places we were, but neither of us knew it and we had not met up until now. Their boats name is not on the boat and I might not have recognized it if they had not called out.

We recalled a wild Harlem Memorial Day Rendezvous near Ellis Island in NY Harbor. We had rafted up to Phat Cat and then another smaller sailboat rafted up to our other side and get her mast caught under our back stay. Several men got on top of Phat Cats roof and pulled down to the side on the other boats main halyard to free her. And again, during a Club Cruise, we enjoyed a good time with Dave and Di in Watch Hill, RI.

Phat Cat is a Lagoon 43, built in France, the same length as ILENE but twice as wide, so they have lots of room. It can be rigged with a mast and sails but Phat Cat is not.

The aft stateroom can be divided by a bulkhead down the middle to make two large staterooms if it is used for chartering; but Phat Cat has one immense stateroom, shown here with one of its two cats, Xena or Cassie, reclining on the queen size bed.  She goes faster than us and when we caught up we anchored near her at Cocoa Village, off to the west of the ICW in ten feet of water with 50 feet of snubbed chain.

Dave put down their dink and ferried us around the first night and the next two days that they stayed with us here, before moving on. We had not planned to stay here so long but the nearest place that can do a professional patch on our dink is in St. Augustine and they will not have time to do our job until April 7, so we have slowed down our itinerary to arrive there when they can do the work which will take two days.

We dined on Thai food with Dave and Di at Thai Thai our first night, a pot luck aboard their large boat the second and blueberry pancakes on ILENE the morning of their departure.

Lene making herself at home on Phat Cats back porch.

Dining room with nav station in background

Dave and I dinked across the Indian River to its eastern side where it was a short walk to the local Publix, less than half a mile. The four of us "shopped" Cocoa Village, right by our free dinghy dock, one afternoon. Lene got two pairs of shoes, Dave and Di enjoyed some excellent pastries from the bakery, and we toured Travis hardware, a famous old fashioned place with a huge inventory including tools for use on ocean liners. We bought a better lock to secure the dink to the shore or to the boat,   We are not far from Cape Canaveral where Disney Cruise ships put in with their thousands of passengers. One of the excursions is to take busloads of tourists to Cocoa Village for shopping.

When Dave and Di headed north, we took our dink across to Merrit Island so Lene could get her fix of supermarket shopping. I went back to Travis for a stainless steel snubber hook to replace the rusty mess that we had aboard, and "spline" rubber to affix the new cat proof screening into the frames of the side screens which had been scratched through. I also visited the bank and the Florida Historical society.

They have a good free dinghy dock at Cocoa Village, where one can tie up fore and aft to keep the dink away from the pilings and use the lock amidships to avoid theft. And you can see the shortened tiller extender sticking up, imagine before I cu 18 inches from it!
Lene got a message, her first on this trip, and after dinner at Murdocks,

(southern cuisine --  delicious and inexpensive) we attended the local production of My Fair Lady at the Cocoa Village Historic Playhouse.






And what a treat! The house holds 600. Eliza Doolittle was a sixteen year old. The actors were great and in the choral numbers 48 of them were on stage, supported by an orchestra of sixteen musicians. The costumes and sets were excellent and one would have paid five times as much to see this show on Broadway. Professor Higgins is such a misogynist and yet even today the story is great because the show makes fun of him for it.