Day 187
At 8:40 am, on the calm morning of Tuesday, 03/16/21, we pulled out of our slip at Loggerhead Marina in Palm Beach Gardens, FL, and headed down the short channel back to the ICW, where we turned to port and continued northward. Warm, sunny weather accompanied us with only a slight breeze. We passed Jupiter, FL, with its lovely estates, and I perused each one to see if it might possibly have been the one Burt Reynolds and Sally Field shared back in the day, when they were together and resided in Jupiter, FL. We proceeded in the Indian River, which makes up the ICW that runs west of Jupiter Island, with the Atlantic Ocean just east on the other side. The Indian River is really wide in many spots – seeming more like a lake than a river.
Legacy steadily cruised onward (at her standard, break-neck speed of 10 mph) through the Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge, north into Peck Lake. We had transitioned out of civilization, into a much more natural and wilderness-like environment. Very few houses in this area – mainly the endless mangrove beds and scrubby palm trees of “old Florida”. We cruised into a waterway known as Great Pocket to meet the St. Lucie River and pass Jensen Beach into Jupiter Inlet Aquatic Preserve, which is a huge, pristine waterway that continues on for miles.
We passed the notable Island Princess tour boat, which was packed with sight-seers, as it was going the opposite direction – southward on Peck Lake. Just north of where the Great Pocket meets the St. Lucie River, we entered into the Jensen Beach area and into Jupiter Inlet Aquatic Preserve, where civilization began to reappear, the houses became more numerous, and the waterway widened again and got much shallower.
Back in Lantana when we passed our friends, the Conways, on Pearl, they had advised they were headed for a marina on Nettles Island. We got our first look at Nettles Island where it is located on Jensen Beach on Hutchinson Island South. From our western vantage point on the ICW, I thought Nettles Island looked like hundreds of homes built on floating docks that extended for blocks out into the waterway, but it was actually a development on an extremely low, flat piece of land. The whole place looked very susceptible to flooding in my opinion, but I supposed the developers had to be smarter than I was and so – hopefully – took precautions for that when first designing and developing Nettles Island.
We arrived that afternoon about 2:30 pm at Fort Pierce City Marina, just in time for the wind to start picking up. Higher winds always make for challenging docking, which is not a favorite of ours. Steve expertly wound us around hairpin turns into the marina and up to the fuel docks for a top-off. As we neared the docks, Dean, the Fort Pierce dock master, had to shout to be heard over the wind, which made him bark instructions in my direction as to which lines he needed me to throw him first to most quickly and easily tie Legacy up in that wind. Just then, I looked around and about three other boats were also entering the marina in that wind and simultaneously hailing Dean on the radio. Several of them needed fuel (where we were already tied) and several of them were requesting directions to their transient slips. I could see Dean’s stress-level going up and up, right along with the intensity of the wind. Dean was short-staffed and kept having to abandon our fueling process (which is time-consuming under best conditions) to help other boaters. I could see he was nervous about boats crashing into the docks or into each other in all that wind. (Even the most experienced boat captain has only so much power when battling Mother Nature.) Once we finally finished fueling, Dean gave us directions to our transient slip, which was C84. Dean untied and threw our lines back to me, as Steve maneuvered us out of the path of the other boats and entered our slip bow-in (easiest in high winds), where another dock hand was waiting to help us get tied-up. WHEW! As I’ve mentioned before, slipping bow-in always makes for trickiness getting off and back onto the boat. Therefore, early the next morning, before the winds got going again, Dean came out and helped us turn Legacy around to a stern-in tie. (No need to deliberately give Gilligan a reason to slip and fall off the boat again!)
We’d planned on spending only two nights at Fort Pierce, but when we went to check in, we discovered they’d reserved our slip for us for a full week, which meant we were getting a weekly rate, which was less expensive than a nightly rate, so we decided to stay a little longer. That turned out to be an excellent decision, because the fierce winds of that afternoon were only just getting started, and wound up staying very high until 03/23/21. Gotta love those March winds!
We did a little exploring of our new home that evening and found all kinds of fun amenities to peruse during our stay. We walked over to Cobbs Landing for an early dinner and decided to leave further sight-seeing for the next few days after we’d gotten some rest from our long travel day.
Position: N 27° 27.035, W 80° 19.283
Distance traveled: 45 SM
Total distance traveled: 2691 SM
Total marina nights: 171
Total nights at anchor: 21
Locks today: 0
Locks Total: 27