Day 325 - Port St. Lucie to Vero Beach, FL
Day 325 - Friday, March 17th: We were up and underway about 8:30am on this St. Patrick's Day morning. As we headed out of Tarpon Bay, we noticed this sailboat on a mooring. Seems the mooring ball survived a recent hurricane, but the boat didn't:
We cruised back down the St. Lucie River and turned north in the Intracoastal Waterway. This part of Florida's east coast has several inlets between the Atlantic and the Waterway -- which makes for interesting currents. One minute we would be fighting into the current and a few minutes later, we would be pushed by it. We were sort of lucky, we guessed, because on average we had more current behind us.
It was a fairly short run up to the Vero Beach Municipal Marina where we had reservations for the weekend. We had heard a lot of good comments about the marina and looked forward to the visit to the area.
As we arrived at the marina, we realized the huge size of the mooring field. There were over 55 mooring balls in it and almost all had boats rafted on them.
This is an unusual mooring field. The mooring balls are anchored by huge concrete pilings that are driven twenty feet into the bottom. This makes for a very reliable and strong mooring, so they put several boats on each one when there are a lot of boats. They try to put similar boats together. For instance, these two catamaran sailboats:
…and these trawlers. The one on the left is a Monk 36 like Integrity:
We had requested a slip rather than a mooring (a little more expensive), and were assigned one across from the marina building:
From our boat we had a good view of the "South" mooring field (there is also a "North") and the bridge over to the main part of town:
We confirmed that our friends Sue and Jim from Water Dancer were moored in the field and made plans to get together tomorrow evening. Also, Roxanne and Lenny aboard Summertime were docked at the Vero Beach Yacht Club, a scant hundred yards south of us. We planned to get with them on Sunday.
It was nice to be back with some Loopers again.
We hosed off the boat, filled the water tank, and settled down with a cool one to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. It was a nice place and we planned to explore the area tomorrow.
Position tonight: N27 39.446 W080 20.200
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