North Star on the Great Loop Journey: Vero Beach

Preparing for the trip

Captain Jerry has been making the final preparations to North Star, our 32 foot Cape Island down east trawler. We are anxious to leave our landlubber lives behind and begin our long awaited journey around the Great Circle. Join us as we travel 10, 000 kilometers: through the historic Trent Severn Waterway; the pristine waters of Georgian Bay; the North Channel of lake Huron; and hop from beach to beach on lake Michigan. We will visit Chicago and begin our trek along the rivers: Illinois; upper Mississippi; Ohio; Cumberland: Tennessee; Tenn-Tom Waterway and the Black Warrior. We will have transited through 68 locks at this juncture. We have chosen the inner route from Mobile Alabama to Tarpon Springs Florida and the shorter Ocheechobee Waterway to reach the East coast of Florida. We will skip over to the Bahamas to wait out the winter before heading North on the Atlantic Inter Coastal Waterway.
The 10 years of researching and planning are finally at an end and we invite you to come along on our adventure.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Vero Beach

We spent the night tied to the dock on Fraser Creek at Shepard Park in Stuart. There were some unsavoury characters lurking around until 8:00 but they did not bother us other than to ask for beer.
We walked to Publix to get a few things and returned to the boat for the night. A commercial fisherman in a small boat came by so I chased him down to the boat ramp to see if I could buy some fish from him. He said he didn't have a licence to sell fish to the public but since I was Canadian, he sold me some Goat fish for $2.50 per fish. We have a little over 2 pounds of fillets from 8 fish. There was a fish cleaning station at the dock so the Captain had no trouble doing the dirty deed. We will have that for dinner tonight.
There is a nice river board walk so we were able to go watch the sunset. The water at the fish cleaning station is potable so we filled our tanks in the morning and off we went.
We had a pleasant day on the water today. We travelled 45 miles to Vero Beach. We are anchored outside the mooring field at Vero Beach City Marina. The shores are crowded by large expensive homes so there will be no going ashore. We could go to the dinghy dock for a small fee. The Captain is finishing off his bow painting. I went and stepped in it while trying to take a picture. That will be well appreciated. We now have the side decks to do and the back deck.
We are back in tidal waters and the shrimp are back to nibbling on our hull at night. What they are eating, I can't guess since the hull is perfectly clean. I hope they like copper paint.
We have now completed the Okeechobee Waterway and are going north On the Intracoastal Waterway. This will take us 980 miles to Norfolk Virginia. We have 3650 miles behind us, we are more than half way through the trip.