Christmas Day

Vero Beach Florida, N27 39 W80 22
December 25, 2005

The wind was fierce today and we were anchored in an exposed spot, so we decided to move southward. The next anchorage downward was at Vero Beach. Actually, it’s not an anchorage but a municipal marina.

The trip down was slow. Because of the wind we only made 1.8 knots made good. When we got here, we were supposed to take a left turn to find the channel into the marina. We turned too short and bam, we were hard aground within seconds. Darn. Time to launch the dinghy and do the kedge thing again.

Before we got very far, a rubber raft pulled up and a nice man named John volunteered to help us. John took the anchor and 100 feet of chain and dropped them away. Within 3 minutes we were afloat again.

We pulled into the marina, and wow was it full. Almost every mooring ball had two or three boats rafted together. We never saw such crowding before. The only mooring with one boat belonged to, guess who, our friend John, so we rafted up to his boat. John and his wife Eve are from Oregon. They’ve been cruising since 1993. Eve is a nurse and when they run out of money she gets a short term contract at a local hospital and replenishes their kitty. Nice.

John and Eve told us about a Christmas pot luck supper at the marina office, so Libby cooked our turkey and we took it in to the pot luck. It was lots of fun. There were about 100 people there. Lots of food and lots of laughter. Most of the people were like us, around 60 years old and whose kids had grown up. Many were not headed for the Bahamas, but rather just liked to hang around on the ICW.

We did all our family Christmas calls today. We spoke to Ed, and Nancy, and Marylyn and John and Jenny and
David, and everyone else they had home with them. It’s especially hard to be away on Christmas.