Day 322 - Boca Raton to Jupiter, FL
Day 322 - Tuesday, March 14th: We lounged around this morning so long that we were a little concerned about making the short trip to Jupiter before the marina closes.
The concern was exacerbated (Bill loves that word) by the numerous low drawbridges in the area. They are almost all on a restricted schedule and open only every half hour. If you miss the opening, you have to "hover" for 30 minutes in the current.
When the bridge does open, you can be sure there will be a lot of boat traffic:
One stretch of the waterway passes through mangroves, and the developers haven't put high-rise condominiums on the banks yet. We thought we spotted a flying saucer low on the horizon here…
…but in a few minutes we found out what it was. Very odd shape for a water tower:
This was one of the prettiest bridges. In our tradition of chronicling bridges, we had to get a picture:
Earlier this morning we heard someone shouting at us from shore. It turned out to be our friends Lenny and Roxanne aboard their trawler, Summertime. We had not seen them for months (we met them the first time at the AGLCA Rendezvous in South Carolina last April).
They got underway a few minutes later and we did some "buddy-boating" with them for a while. We were following them after a while and snapped a couple of pictures of Summertime:
Somewhere in the Palm Beaches is this colorful "sign" marking something that looked like a museum; it was a cool sight:
There was a spot on our route where one bridge opened only at a quarter to and a quarter past the hour and the next one opened on the hour and at half past the hour. The bridges were three miles apart, so follow the math here…
If we pass through bridge #1 at 1:00pm, we must travel at 12 mph to make bridge #2 by 1:15. No way Integrity can make 12 mph comfortably.
The alternative is to travel at 4 mph and make bridge #2 at 1:45. Integrity, at dead idle, travels about 5 mph. To make things worse, there was a 1.5 mph current from behind us pushing us at about 6.5 mph when we wanted to go 4 mph.
Confused? Suffice it to say we had to hover in the current below the second bridge for quite a while before it opened. We were relieved when it finally did:
We passed this container ship farther upstream. It was different from many cargo vessels in that it was self-loading. Those big cranes allow the ship to load or unload independent of shore-side facilities:
This picture can confuse you. It looks like the barge and crane want to go under the bridge. Nope. They are working on the PGA Boulevard Bridge. Passing boats have to squeeze between the barge and the bridge abutment. The space was about 25-30 feet wide:
We made it (and didn't have to have the bridge open).
That was the last bridge for today. In a couple of miles, we arrived at Loggerhead Marina in Jupiter, the most expensive marina we have visited. We normally would not have stopped here, but it was about the only game in town, and we had dinner plans with one of Ruth's friends and her husband, Terri and Gus. Terri had attended the lectures in Ft. Lauderdale with Ruth. Terri and Gus spend winters here and summers on Lake Michigan.
Dinner was delightful and the company was fun.
It had been sort of a stressful day, so we turned in as soon as we got back to the boat.
Position tonight: N26 52.809 W080 04.434
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