Tuesday, April 7 — A Taste of Southern Florida

Melbourne seems to be a dividing line between what I think of as the real world and “southern Florida.” We are far from being in the official south Florida — in fact, our latitude is about the same as Tampa, but the number of people in the water, on the water and around the water jumped exponentially as we headed south from Melbourne. We saw many northbound boats headed for home, but many more recreational fishing boats, jet skis, pontoon boats, walk around and walk-throughs, fishing kayaks, skiffs, paddle boards, etc.  This morning we even saw 8-man scull teams putting their boats away (shout out to The Boys in the Boat readers — the boys were a treat to behold!) We missed the actual racing with a lazy wake-up without an alarm. We didn’t have much distance to cover today and took it slow most of the way. There are some beautiful homes on the shores near Melbourne. There are wall-to-wall beautiful homes on the ICW shores in the Vero Beach area. Wow and wow-plus. We were surprised that many of them did not have docks and that none of them had mega-yachts moored behind them. Cliff supposed that they’d spent all their money on the homes. An argument that might hold water, except that I’ve cruised through Ft. Lauderdale where that is not the case at all. We are in a tiny marina inside a lovely gated community. The residents are happily tucked away from any city hubbub and they all must have cars. There is nothing really close to the marina, so we will be cabbing it for dinner and to a market. Our re-provisioning foray in Titusville was completely inadequate. We ate it all yesterday. We were down to a choice of a half-peanut butter sandwich (we are nearly out of peanut butter), some sort-of-stale pita chips and a nearly full container of cottage cheese (thank you Roger). Thankfully we had a green pepper, some left-over red onion and some celery sticks, so Ann made a good Jewish dairy dish. It should tide us over to dinner.