CruisingKatmandu

 Story line to added later: Launch of SpaceX Heavy  Navy SEAL Navy SEAL Museum Ft. Pierce  Waiting out a 2 hour deluge Our Dana Beach? SpaceX Launch Hail, wind and lightning storm Uh oh, batten down the hatches!  Hail!

Wreck of Benwood Porkfish from Grunt family, oink, oink Trumpet fish, TaDa! The Wreck of Benwood Other scuba divers with cameras Squirrel Fish Yours truly Wreck of Benwood Grouper  

Pennykamp is a Florida State park with lots of amenities: camping, museum, aquarium, beach, boats for snorkel trips, a dive shop and  dive boats. The boat camping is on hold because they are repairing the docks. The mooring balls are available but their erroneous website lists the mooring balls as unavailable until September. I kept calling the dive shop until I got a real person on the line to make an inquiry. Tenacity is the key to succeeding in life! Consequently we were the only boat on a mooring ball in the park.  The dive shop folks set us up with a dive to the 40 ' deep wreck of the Benwood, a WWII ship. It had a collision with another ship. The captain was running with their lights off and in quiet mode because German U-boats were rumored to be in the area. Poor sailors The second dive was Molasses Reef where we swam through coral arches.  We left Pennykamp with fond memories at daybreak so to make 60 NM to Fort Lauderdale before sunset. It was time to leave the K...

The wind here is still pretty blustery on occasion.  We are as good as any weathermen and we forecast that the fronts will move and winds will change sooner than the published reports expect. Humph.  We cruised under Seven Mile Bridge to be in the Florida Bay for another 24 hours. I had an insight about water covering it the Earth. Well, it is not too deep, just barely covering for hundreds of square miles. It took us a while to get over a pucker when the depth sonar said 5 ft to 6 ft of water. But that is considered an average depth this trip.  After a quiet night at Jewfish Hole, with beautiful stars to gaze at for entertainment, we sailed into the ocean again by Long Key. Destination: Rodriguez Key Anchorage. Last year we viewed Rodriguez from the vacation condo windows! This year we saw 3 sad, grounded abandoned sailboats in the mangroves. So we pulled up anchor the next morning. Then we went into Lake Largo and the Pilot House Restaurant and Marina for 42 gallons of ...

 We pulled up anchor and left Ligumvitae Key on Friday and went outside to the ocean and Hawks Channel through Channel 5 inlet. We had a wonderful motor sail in the ocean with relatively calm conditions down to Vaca Key which is actually the key on which Marathon is located. Florance got to do a little impromptu snorkeling to disentangle a stone crab trap that got tangled around our port sail drive. We pulled into Boot Key Harbor where we have picked up a mooring ball. We were amazed how many boats there are here in Boot Key Harbor, 211 mooring balls and a lot of full-time live-a-board residents using them.  Almost everyone we've dealt with here from taxi cab drivers to dive masters live on their boats here in Boot Key Harbor. It's very reasonable, only $26 a day or around $400 a month which includes inexpensive water and a dinghy dock. We were able to do our Publix/wagon thingy and provisioned the boat. Florance checked into diving and we were very fortunate on Sunday afterno...