Day 201
Another calm and peaceful morning, with glass-like water, Legacy left her wall-tie at New Smyrna Beach City Marina at 8:05 am on Tuesday morning, 03/30/21. Thank you, Weather Gods! 😊 The temps were a bit higher and more humid, with the sun trying to emerge from behind the clouds. As we traveled northward up the ICW, civilization disappeared again, with the river banks changing over to more palms, sand, and mangroves. In fact, mangroves, mangroves, and more mangroves!
Sometime yesterday afternoon, the ICW stopped being the Indian River North and became the Halifax River. One short portion of the Halifax is known as the Ponce De Leon Cut, which is where we were when our morning took a sharp nosedive, when a US Coast Guard Cutter, filled with 18-19 year old officers, put an end to our serenity and decided to – quite deliberately – come from behind us at full throttle and wake the SH-T out of poor Legacy, for NO reason! Steve had almost no time to turn our bow to port – into the giant wake – to keep from being fully slammed up against our port side. The massive waves sent us (and all the contents on our boat) reeling with its force. I thought at the last minute to grab my coffee cup, but, for those of you who saw my earlier Facebook post of my beloved pet plant, Heidi Hibiscus, riding up on the table with us in the flybridge, I’m sure you’ve already guessed what happened to that poor plant when the Coast Guard pitched us immediately into “high seas”. The pot flipped right over and plummeted to the flybridge floor, breaking that poor hibiscus into pieces and covering the floor, seat cushions, and most of the table itself in rich, dark potting soil! GRRR! I already know you’re thinking, well my goodness – who keeps a potted plant on a boat, let alone up in the flybridge of a boat, while it’s underway? Having plants along with us is my last ditch attempt to hold onto my previous life, so I was taking the risk and living on the edge with Heidi. Welp, I got my just desserts. In rough sea conditions, I often stow my plants below on the floor of a shower stall in one of the heads. Today was a perfectly clear, mirror-like water day, so my plant was out. We had no idea someone was going to be this purposefully mean to us, or Heidi would’ve been stowed below this morning, too! I spent the next hour and a half cleaning dirt out of the flybridge, which is not easy to do while we’re underway, since I had no access to a hose, plus we needed to pay attention to our route as we continued on. Why didn’t we pull off to the side of the channel and drop anchor to clean up the mess, you might ask? Well, first of all there was no space deep enough for us to do that without running aground, and if the only water I could’ve used to wash-out the flybridge would’ve been salt water coming straight out of the ICW (since we try not to use our drinking water to wash off the boat). So Steve helmed while I swept and moist-wiped the flybridge as best I could. I put what was left of the pitiful plant back into her pot and tried to recover her roots. We were both really upset that our own government would deliberately treat us so rudely, and all just for an 18-year-old kid’s laugh. Right after this happened, we passed a Coast Guard barge doing some work in the ICW. They hailed us on Channel 16 to ask us what “the water conditions back in the Ponce De Leon Cut had been”. They were laughing at what their counterparts had just done to us! Steve responded that water conditions had been just fine until their cutter just waked the SH*T out of us. I’m glad we could provide that morning’s entertainment for those kids! Thinking back on it, had I not had that plant sitting up there so precariously, the whole situation wouldn’t have been nearly as bad, as we were fortunate that nothing inside the boat had fallen and broken during the debacle. SO, I know I was madder at myself than I was those coast guard officers, but still – the whole thing sure put a damper on our morning! 🙁
Once our mess was as cleaned-up as possible, we continued northward, giving all Coast Guard vessels an extra-wide berth. As we traveled past the Daytona area, we saw another rash of sunken and derelict boats. We even passed a bona fide hoarder living on a sailboat! After we passed Daytona proper and were north of that city, the luxurious, multi-million dollar homes started again along the river banks. We passed Port Orange, Daytona Beach, Ormond Beach, Ormand-By-The-Sea, Flagler Beach, and Beverly Beach. The further up the ICW we progressed, we noticed that the inside bank of the ICW became mostly wilderness and the outside bank (the one that holds the Atlantic beachfront homes) was covered with gorgeous home after gorgeous home.
As we traveled, we noticed a profusion of yellow butterflies crossing the ICW all around our boat, apparently migrating back south for the spring, as the last time we’d seen so many of them was last fall when they seemed to be migrating north along the Tennessee River. They seem so small and fragile, it amazes me they are able to travel the distances they do. We continued through Tomoka Marsh Aquatic Preserve, passed Flagler Beach, and went through the Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area.
We began seeing strong storms to our north on the radar, which was why we were trying to reach our marina at Palm Coast before we caught up to those storms. Just then, we passed a small, de-masted sailboat, motoring along beside us in the ICW, and recognized it to be Esther B, whose crew we’d met last fall at Island Cove Marina, outside of Chattanooga on the Tennessee River. Of course I got very excited and we conversed with each other back and forth over Nebo, sending each other pictures of our respective boats underway, as we’d passed. Esther B moves much more slowly than Legacy, but we knew we’d most likely catch up again down the line.
We traveled up the Matanzas River at the noon hour, fighting a pretty strong current that slowed us down from 10 mph to 7 mph for the final leg of today’s journey, but we arrived at Palm Coast Marina at 12:50 pm that afternoon, and found it to be a lovely, nice area. Once we were tied-up, connected to power, and showered, we walked over to a nearby shopping area called European Village to look around and have some dinner. The shopping area is a large, enclosed area that you walk inside of, with all shops/restaurants facing inward onto a large nicely-appointed courtyard. Stores and eateries from different parts of the world inhabit the village, which explained its name. I was starving and immediately caught a whiff of Indian food cooking, so I gravitated toward 5th Element Indian Cuisine. Much to our dismay, this particular restaurant was still serving take-out food only, thanks to my old pal Covid. We had to stand at the front door and order everything in take-out boxes and bags, where we had to spread it all out ourselves on one of the outdoor tables to eat it. We were expecting to dine al fresco, but at least hoped for normal tableware and cutlery. WRONG! The food took forever to arrive, but was delicious in spite of the fact that we had no wait staff. We found that other restaurants in the village were not as strict as this one, so we patronized them in the days to come, since they didn’t treat us so much like lepers.
The village itself was attractive, but appeared to have been more so back when it was first constructed. Many of the shop-fronts were empty because of COVID, and it looked like the exterior was past due for maintenance and a face-lift. The areas surrounding the village were very nice, well-maintained and upscale, so it was odd seeing a place like this right in the center looking bedraggled. Still, it was something to do within walking distance of the boat, so we took advantage of it!
Position: N 29° 34.630, W 81° 11.587
Distance traveled: 43 SM
Total distance traveled: 2854 SM
Total marina nights: 179
Total nights at anchor: 21
Locks today: 0
Locks Total: 27