The photo above is the Intracoastal Waterway.  We are anchored right off it in New Smyrna Beach.  It would be nice if we could take the ICW to Port Canaveral but there is one 65 foot bridge stopping us.  On the ICW, there are multiple places to stop for the night and one rarely has to worry about getting somewhere before dark.  Most sailboats and all powerboats can easily take the ICW.  We just happen to have a mast which is a little too high to go under 65 ft bridges, the standard height on the ICW.

We will have to go out to the ocean for a 62 mile sail to Port Canaveral.  We can’t count on doing that in a day, as the winds are almost nonexistent.  Then, we have that short day thing.  When we came here last summer, we left Port Canaveral at 7 am and arrived here at 5 pm.  That was an average of 6 kts.   We decided to change our strategy.

We’ll leave here at dusk today, getting out of the channel by about 6:30 pm and on our way south.  If we happen to make better time than we think, we can always slow down.  We wouldn’t want to enter the Port Canaveral Inlet in the dark with cruise ships and other commercial craft coming in.  In fact, it’s never a good idea to enter an inlet from the ocean at night.  While they all have marked channels, often most of the markers aren’t lit.  That means I sit on the front deck of the boat with a spotlight searching for the green and red markers while Mark stays between them.  Even getting to an anchorage in the dark is not safe.  Many boats do not use an anchor light so again, out comes the spotlight to be sure we don’t run into another boat.

We’ll fill up with fuel and go through a lift bridge and the Canaveral Locks to a nice anchorage where we’ll rest until late afternoon.
At around dark we’ll go back out to the ocean and sail overnight to Ft. Lauderdale.  Again, this trip is just a little too far to make it during the daylight hours.  We should arrive there in the morning and will travel through a number of lift and bascule bridges to New River, where we will stay at a marina for a week.  The Ft. Lauderdale Boat Show begins today and ends on Monday.  We’ll probably attend it one day.  We’ll also be provisioning for our trip to the Bahamas and Jennifer will be coming to visit for a few days.  Probably first on the agenda, however, will be washing the boat.  That’s one big disadvantage about anchoring instead of staying at marinas where there is plenty of water to use.  We are encrusted with salt and lots of dirt as we haven’t been at a marina since we left Charleston.