It’s a go! We decided to move on since the weather forecast was favorable. The skies were sunny and the winds were light. We had to wait for the tide to switch directions at 9 AM, so that it would push the boat away from the dock and be easier to turn around in the basin. We readied everything and took Auggie for his morning walk so that we would be ready to go at a moment’s notice. With a little help from a neighboring boater, we pulled away from the dock with ease and were on our way at 9:15.
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We asked the bridge tender to open the Roosevelt Bridge and moved out into the St. Lucie River on our way to the ICW.
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Clouds moved in, but that would give us some relief from the heat. We passed this sailboat which went aground–maybe with the storms we had on Sunday.
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Looking on the radar, we saw a band of storms moving across the state in front of us, so I prepared the boat and ourselves for rain. We ran into the rain about 10:40 as we neared Ft. Pierce. It rained lightly and there wasn’t much wind at all. As we cruised along, we came upon this boat. Bob thought this was a great use of a sailboat… for advertising.
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We were able to check the radar on our phone’s app quite frequently and avoid the rain. It’s nice to be able to do that while we’re traveling to see what’s up ahead. We slowed down to let the storms pass and move out into the ocean. Now we cruised past Ft. Pierce with the rain to the west and south of us.
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We were trying to get to Vero Beach before any more rain arrived. Another large band of storms was moving across the state, but we picked up speed to get to Vero Beach before it did. We arrived in Vero Beach, got tied up, and closed up before the thunderstorm hit. The thunder off in the distance was our reminder to hurry.
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It rained lightly at first and then came down in torrents around 2:00. It rained pretty steadily until dinner. We were happy to be tied up and relaxing through the rain. There was a short break in the rain, so Auggie and I took advantage of that to take his walk. We got back to the boat just in time, as it started to come down really hard. We relaxed watching some TV after dinner. We made plans to take the bus to the beach tomorrow and check out some of the sights.