Arriving Velcro Beach

Bright and early, once again, we head out from our anchorage at Cocoa, Florida. The departure was uneventful - in other words: seamless - YEAH! The day was overcast and as I sat in the cockpit facing the stern for the majority of the day, I could see the dark sky in the distance. It looked brighter ahead toward our destination at Vero Beach (or "Velcro Beach" as it seems to be affectionately known among cruisers and visitors to the area). As the day began clouding over more and more, there were plenty of small boats and fishermen running for cover. Blair finally had to put on his foul weather coat when the cold front swept through. The channel was narrow on the way for the bulk of the day - and many of the markers were in different spots than on the charts and the chart plotter.
Blair did all the steering (by autopilot when he was able, and by hand when necessary through the markers). The only time the autopilot failed, of course, is when Blair went down below and left me in charge at the helm - hell...I hate that! I was only too happy to surrender the wheel back to Blair. The only other very minor episode occurred when Blair begged me to relieve him for a toilet break. There were so few boats out that I was confident that I could manage to keep Odissea centred in the deepest part of the channel for at least five minutes. However, to add interest to this was the fact that the speaker in the cockpit is now not operating at all - it appears to be, not the wiring (as originally suspect), but the speaker itself that has malfunctioned. As Blair left the cockpit for the head, a catamaran on our stern sent a radio message: "Sailboat flying a Canadian flag approaching marker number 40, please advise which side we can pass you on." Holy smokes, why now!!? Once I shook off the fact that I was being asked to perform two functions (steering and operating the radio at the same time), I gave myself a quick stern talking to, reached for the portable hand held radio, pushed one of the buttons on the side, and responded in my best official voice: "You may pass our sailboat on the port side." There, I had done it. I waited, but no response from the catamaran. Miraculously, Blair appeared and I was overjoyed to see him. He returned to the wheel, and I quickly told him that I had asked the cat to pass on our port side. The next thing we know, the cat is passing on the starboard side, and is contacting us again by radio with their intentions. Now, the funny part to all this is that Blair is unable to respond to them because , unknown to me, I have locked the radio - that was the button I had pushed and held on the radio (the "lock" button), thinking I was having a radio conversation with the catamaran. All Blair could say to me after this was that I should ask for a refund from the sailing school that I had taken my lessons from a couple of years ago. I decide I don't want to steer again today. I spend the rest of the day wondering what our approach and arrival in Vero Beach is going to bring us. We decided to first go to the fuel dock for fuel, a pumpout, and to fill up the water tanks. I am a little apprehensive about this, but aside from the minimal amount of help from the city employee at the dock, the first experience we have had with a dock since St. Augustine goes reasonably smoothly. Blair gets our mooring assignment and we study it, mapping our strategy for the approach both cautiously and meticulously. We will be rafting up on a mooring with another boat, and we have absolutely no idea what this is going to look like. We get all kinds of fenders ready on the port side of the boat so that the starboard side will be free for us to run the generator twice a day without irritating the hell out of everyone around us. As we approach the boat on our assigned mooring, they have their dinghy tied to the side we want to raft on to - and they have positioned some fenders on to the port side of their boat. OH NO...my heart races as we approach their boat and Blair has a conversation with them. Change of plans - we will tie to their port side. Now I race to untie the fenders and move them to the other side of our boat, with Blair nudging me to hurry. He tried to sound calm, but there is an edge of panic in his voice nonetheless. We circled around a number of boats on their moorings, and I said a million Hail Mary's that we will not come anywhere near them. The couple on the boat we will raft to have lines ready to throw to us, and I have lines to throw to them. Blair slinks up close to them and we all start throwing lines all over, tying up every cleat we can find. They look just as nervous as we do, but they are a tremendous help. By the time the last line is dropped through the ring in the mooring, we all breathe a huge sigh of relief. They turn out to be a very lovely couple: Jesse and Ginny Price on a very pretty Nauticat. They come aboard a short time after our successful arrival, and we share and swap adventure and stories - and plenty of laughs.
We finish off our day with a pasta dinner on the boat, and head off to bed, knowing that we can sleep in as we are safely tied up to a mooring at the Vero Beach Municipal Marina.
Some interesting facts about Vero Beach, Florida:
Vero Beach has an affluent ocean resort that is close to the ICW, although the city itself is a couple of miles inland. Vero Beach also processes much of the Indian River citrus crop before shipping it to points around the country.