Thursday May 15: New Smyrna Beach - Headed North

We are definitely back in Florida - welcome to the land of bridges! And crazy large homes. And original small Florida homes that have not yet been knocked down to make way for the crazy large homes.

Lots of wildlife along the waterways here (once north of Palm Beach), including the pelicans. Which was interesting as there were no pelicans in the Bahamas. Seemed strange to us.

Osprey are all over the place as well as the wonderful white pelicans. And lots of dolphins again. The travel has been pleasant with sunny skies and a nice breeze from the south pushing us north.

The inlets we pass by show the conditions of the waves due to the E or ESE winds of 15 - 20 knots. Not a day to be on the ocean! If we hadn't been able to cross on Sunday, we would still be sitting at the West End as the one day weather window we were watching fell apart. Looks like it would be mid next week for the next opportunity!

I loved this guy who was out in his kayak with his dog. Pull up on a sand bar at low tide, plant the umbrella and good to go!

For a weekday, it was surprising how many people were out and enjoying the sunny weather.

But the weather was changing quickly. We spent Tuesday night anchored behind Serenity Island - one of our favorite places to anchor.

It was still pretty windy and the rain clouds came and went. The double rainbow (second one left was very faint) was worth it - plus it never did rain on us.

And the sunset was nice to boot.


Wednesday we played tag with the rain showers that came and went most of the day.

Mostly we somehow managed to avoid them but it was getting more and more windy. Rather than anchor out again, we opted to try out the Titusville Marina - someplace we'd never been.

Nice enough marina but we didn't really explore very much - maybe next time through.

Rain and thunder storms were due in today so we were up and moving at 7 this morning. The original plan was to stop at Daytona Beach - 50 miles or 7 hours of travel.

This particular part of the ICW is one of the most boring, in my opinion. Indian River and Mosquito Lagoon are large shallow bodies of water so not much to see.

Except at Haulover Canal which connects these two bodies of water. It's the home of many manatee - we weren't disappointed as several of them were nearby the boat as we passed through the channel.

Radar on weather.com was showing the storms arriving at Daytona about the same time as us - docking in rain and high winds is never on our list of things we love so we stopped after 32 miles.

So here we sit at the free dock in New Smyrna Beach with the rain, lightening and thunder carrying on.

Definitely a good night to be tied to a dock :-)