When arriving at a new marina, Paula usually sprays the lines from the pier to the boat at their attachment points on C Ghost and at the dock and also treats the companionway entrance to discourage critters from taking a cruise with us, but last night in the Vero Beach City marina she forgot. As Paula filled the coffee pot this morning, she saw her arch nemesis, a fat and sassy cockroach, skitter from the vicinity of the companionway stairs over onto the galley counter. It is no exaggeration to say that mayhem ensued. Profanity, physical violence, and chemical warfare followed in short order, and ended with the intruder dead, but insecticide on more of the galley surfaces than is recommended by the FDA. Rather than delay our departure, we disposed of the corpse and left the remainder of the scene of the crime unwashed, with the thought to do a full decontamination when we arrived in our next port.

Today’s goal was to reach Titusville, 74 miles North. Accordingly, we got up very early and prepared to go. The only shallow water we saw all day was in our exit from the Vero Beach marina. We crept through a 6-foot area and made it back to the welcome 12-foot depths of the ICW. The morning was beautiful. The featured picture is of the sun rising behind some large and towering clouds that reflected beautifully off the flat calm water.

Fortunately, threaten was all these clouds and some thunderheads did. They crept N and W, but never made it over top of us. It was interesting to look at the radar picture and see their signatures on the screen, then look up at the real thing!

Several areas we passed today had sandbars that reached almost to the channel, and there were multiple dolphin sightings.

C Ghost moved especially quickly thru the water, which we attribute to her recent hull cleaning, and we were gratified to notice that the vibration we heard has also resolved, again likely to the plant life on the hull being gone.

We only had one drawbridge to contend with today. The was the one over the NASA causeway, just 6 miles shy of Titusville. Because of the shift workers at NASA, the bridge doesn’t open between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm to accommodate shift change. There was no way we could get there by 3:30pm, even with our 6:20 am start, so in the last part of our journey we dawdled and arrived only 20 minutes before the bridge would again be taking opening requests. Cars were streaming over the bridge like ants. Tommy hailed the tender, who advised he’d open at the first break in traffic after 5pm. We circled a bit, and then the tender hailed us to say he saw a gap in traffic about 15 seconds ahead. We told him we were ready, and he stopped the traffic and we went thru smoothly. Looking over our shoulders, we could see that even with the short, approximately 3 minutes time it took for the tender to stop traffic, open the bridge, and for us to pass through, a huge back-up had accumulated in each direction.

We found the approach to Titusville Municipal Marina and entered the channel with a stiff breeze on our beam. The marina is large, and appeared nearly full. We were grateful to have the assistance of Charles, a friendly dockhand, who pointed out our slip and took the lines from Paula. As we walked to the office a manatee swam by and briefly surfaced. A train passed by the marina: audible, visible, and very homey and comforting. We saw many beautiful sailboats, including two with motorcycles on the bow. If we wind up stuck here by weather, we will have lots to see and explore.