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This year at the end of our trip we chose to make passage from West End to Fort Pierce. The big advantage of this is that traveling further with the Gulf Stream takes less time than fighting your way across it to West Palm Beach. The downside is that you still need to report in to Border Protection in West Pal Beach for Immigration and a new Cruising Licence. We shared a hired car with Skip and Harriet and took a day out to accomplish this and some other tasks.
The dockside restaurant had wonderful tuna sushi and we indulged ourselves as a starter before our evening meal. The marina was very welcoming and well appointed but I still have not got used to a dinghy on the davits. As a result I ripped off some patches along the port safety line and we will have to replace them after our visit to the UK.
The weather was generally kind to us for our trip back to the Chesapeake Bay this summer. We went up theGulf Stream from Fort Pierce to St Augustine and then up the ICW to the ST Marys River by Cumberland Island. Once again we went out to the Atlantic Ocean from there with good weather to get to North Carolina. Our friend John in Misty left Brunswick and joined us on passage while Moondance retreated back to the ICW in the rolling swell. John could not manage two nights at sea so we went back inland at Wynah Bay and up the Waccamaw River to anchor in the Bull River.
We had some rain and wind here but were able to explore in the dinghies. There were lots of alligators and turtles along the waterways and the banks we lined with beautiful white flowers called spider lilies (Hymenocallis). The current in some of the channels was fierce.
One of the big events of May was the birth of Amelie Noor to our eldest daughter Jo and her husband Nigel. We can’t wait to meet up with her in Colorado later in the summer! She looks just gorgeous!
We have had a good trip with regard to edible fish caught. In addition to the usual vicious barracudas and the tasty cero mackerel there were others. One Blackfin Tuna leaving the reefs by Eleuthera to go to the Abacos. One Black Grouper while passing Sale Rocks near Great Sale Cay - a very unusual trolling trophy indeed! These are reef fish and rarely go for trolled lures. There was a nice female Mahi-Mahi in the Gulf Stream which reminded us of our Atlantic Crossing catches. Always welcome because they are sooo tasty! Our last catch was a good sized Little Tunny. These are not highly prized by most US fisherman as the meat is very dark. We find that prompt bleeding and removal of the darkest meat leaves very tasty steaks or fillets which can be cooked with black pepper coating or as a Thai curry. Yum! We seem to have some success with our fishing enterprises but lots of other boats do not seem able to catch any. We are often asked what we do to succeed but we have no special magic technique. We use standard hand line ‘yo-yos’ and colourful ‘squid’ lures. We have tried using spinners, cedar and coloured plugs as well as diving plugs but these have never produced a single fish! Others seem to have great success with cedar plugs so who knows what is secret to all of this? We will continue to experiment with different lures but never bigger ones. We do not need bigger fish!
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