This morning, we decided to move to Old Port Cove Marina in North Palm Beach.  We had to go to a marina sometime before we leave the country to get a 50 hour check on our new diesel engines and this worked out better than going to one in Ft. Lauderdale.  Also, we needed an address to mail our new electric windlass for the anchor and a place for Mark to work on it. The Yanmar mechanic came today and made a slight adjustment on the engines, so that got done.  Our windlass should arrive tomorrow and Mark will be able to get that installed.

While we hated to spend the money on a marina, Old Port Cove is extremely nice, mostly filled with large yachts. It is also relatively inexpensive (for South Florida in the winter) at $1.33 a foot, after a 25% discount with our BoatUS membership.  Above, we are in our slip next to a beautifully landscaped park area of the marina.  The photo at the left shows how tight the slip was for us to get into.  I was amazed at how Mark eased us right between the posts on each side of the slip, especially with the wind and current pushing us away, and having to make a sharp turn.

To get to this marina, we only had to go to the edge of the large North Palm Beach anchorage where we have been since Sunday.  During that time it rained almost continuously, so Mark and Daisy got wet every time they went ashore in the dinghy.  There is a very nice shopping/restaurant area steps from the dinghy dock they were using, right behind a Publix Grocery.  Today, after getting settled into our slip, we took a short walk down US1 to the nearby Starbucks, just past the Publix.  For the next three days, Starbucks is running their “Buy One, Get One Free” for holiday drinks, so that was good timing. 

When we left Stuart, we still had some things on our “to do” list, and the next few days at this marina will give us a chance to get them done in a comfortable setting.  Mark is hoping it won’t take him too long to install the new windlass, although the old one he has to remove first was very corroded.  Luckily, it did pull the anchor chain up this morning but we suspect that may have been the end of it.  We were very lucky this didn’t happen after we got to The Bahamas, where we’ll be at anchor for five months, moving from island to island.  Not only would we have to order the part from the States, we would have to find an island where it could be delivered, not an easy task in the Exumas.

I must admit, it is nice to be at a marina after sitting in such bad weather at anchor for four straight days and nights.  Tuesday night we got over 10 inches of rain in the area in a few hours.  Since it has been cloudy and rainy since we dropped anchor in North Palm Beach, our solar panels have not charged our batteries, thus we had to run the generator and carefully watch our power usage. Tonight, it was nice to be able to turn our Christmas tree lights on again.

We will probably leave Palm Beach on Sunday.  Monday is a perfect day to cross to the Bahamas with little wind and 2 ft waves, but we have to get a little further south to do that. Miami is ideal, but Ft. Lauderdale works too. We normally would take one short day to get to Ft. Lauderdale and another to get to Miami arriving there on Monday, thus missing the weather window. While we would like enough wind to sail faster, we’ll take light winds and a smoother ride especially when crossing the Gulf Stream.