DAY THREE -- STUART TO MELBOURNE

                                    DAY THREE -- STUART TO MELBOURNE 

           We got a slow start this morning. Filled up with diesel at the marina and left the fuel dock at 1030. Immediately ran into boats waiting for the railroad and highway bridges to open. The main line of the Florida East Coast Railway (built by Henry Flagler) runs right through Stuart and trains went by regularly while we were there. Once the train passed the rail bridge opened and then the adjacent highway bridge. 

            It took half an hour to run from these bridges to the "crossroads" where the St. Lucie River and St. Lucie Inlet and the intracoastal waterway all intersect. This is at mile marker 988 on the intracoastal waterway, with Norfolk being mile zero. In many ways I feel like this is the start of our trip, as it is all new water from here to NYC. I took a picture of St. Lucie Inlet and the Atlantic Ocean to commemorate the occasion.

            Our run up the intracoastal from the crossroads was uneventful. There was a bit more traffic than what we saw in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie canals, but not much. We probably saw a dozen cruising boats all day. The most noteworthy part of the trip was the pollution in the Indian River, in which the intracoastal runs from St. Lucie Inlet up a bit beyond Cape Canaveral. The Indian River is a shallow, 2-to-3-mile wide, brackish lagoon that is famous for its large population of manatees. In recent years it has become infamous for the water pollution that is killing the seagrass on which the manatees feed and was in the news quite a bit this past winter (at least in Florida) for the large numbers of manatees that were dying by starvation. Anyhow, we both noticed while underway that our throats were scratchy, and I kept sneezing and blowing my nose (all of which can be signs of blue-green algae decay) and then we ran into a long stretch -- at least a few miles -- of floating turds. I hate to say this but -- having boated on Lake Erie as a kid and canoed on the White River in downtown Indianapolis as an adult -- I know what a floating turd looks like. Very sad. 

            We decided to anchor out for the night and based on the cruising guides and our energy level, we chose a well-protected anchorage just inside Dragon Point, which is a long narrow spit that separates the Indian and Banana Rivers just north of the Eau Gallie Causeway bridge in Melbourne. It wasn't at all secluded, but it was calm and quiet. The people in the houses along the shore weren't noisy, and neither were the other half dozen boats anchored nearby. Janet made spaghetti and we had a nice bottle of Chianti Classico and all was well. We ended the day with a lovely sunset over Dragon Point.

P.S. After we fueled up this morning, I was able to do a fuel economy calculation. During our first two days we traveled 172 miles (give or take a mile) and burned 128 gallons of diesel (including what we used to run the generator both days, which was probably no more than 4 or 5 gallons). That gives 1.34 mpg -- or 1.40 mpg if we ignore fuel for the generator. Not as good as I had hoped, but not that bad.