Friday, January 7, 2011

Palm Beach Yachting Center – the sun returns

I have no food for you!
Rather chilly this morning, in the 40’s so we fired up the genset and warmed the cabin. We raised anchor around 8:30 and set out to tackle the 12 bridges we had before resting for the day. Much to our surprise, the bridge openings went smoothly, we never had to wait more than 10 minutes and that was only on two bridges. The rest we arrived just in time for an opening but we did have to rev at top speed to make several of the bridges which is 7.7 kts for us. We found the bridge operators to be polite and on-time.
Bill Spencer, recognize this boat?
Coming into the PB Yachting Center, we weren’t sure where the channel was and calls to the marina went unanswered so I drifted in and later found I was outside the channel over a rocky bottom but I made it through okay. Like most of the docks in the area, they are fixed and unforgiving. Mostly, you just try to keep impacts with the piers at as slow a speed as possible.

Sunset over the ICW
Joe Mastri met us at the dock and out we went for a tour of the area which has some very expensive real estate and wound up at the Banana Boat for dinner which is right on the ICW. Saturday we’ll go shopping with Joe to reprovision before leaving on Sunday. This sure beats snow in New York!