Day 65 - West Palm Beach to Stuart

Happy Birthday Captain Randy!  There is no better day to Randy than a day on the boat and he never gets to spend his birthday on our boat (unless he goes to the storage shed to work on it).  I walked to the laundry room with one more load and meet the owners of the boat Riverdance, also on our dock.  They brought the boat to West Palm Beach last November from Maryland and, like us, are going back and forth from home to the boat.  They are not Loopers, just snowbirds.  In fact we had not met any Loopers on this leg of our journey.  We’re not sure it they were avoiding the larger ports or just staying in different marinas.

Before getting underway to Stuart we took some pictures in the marina, then walked to the West Palm Beach Antique and Flea Market and the Farmer’s Market.  On the way, we saw our Irish friend again, this time in front of J. Flynn’s Irish Pub talking to a couple; I heard the word “beheaded” and wondered if he always greets people with morbid conversation topics.  We each had an egg croissant for breakfast from one of the booths, along with fresh cider donuts with dipping sauce.

 

We headed to the fuel dock at 11:30 am and left there at 11:5 am5.  The channel through Lake Worth is marked “Slow Speed” so it took us 20 minutes or so to reach Peanut Island and the Lake Worth Inlet to get back on the Atlantic.  It was a very warm day in the low 80s, starting clear with clouds building around noon.  It was much less windy than the day before.

We turned north, passing North Palm Beach which is more high-rise and mid-rise buildings, blending into single family homes on the outskirts.  Next was the Lighthouse at Jupiter Inlet and Jupiter Island.  There were now some bare stretches of beach mixed in with homes; no more tall buildings.  The beachfront homes are still quite large, but further apart.  The boat traffic was essentially gone.  Just south of the St. Lucie Inlet is a sand bar and there were lots of small fishing boats here.  Just inside the Inlet, the ICW and the St. Lucie River converge, and a short distance from there we turned down a channel leading to Port Salerno, near Stuart, where our friend Betsy Riley lives.  Betsy used to live in Chicago and we met her at Diversey Harbor, where she had a boat for many years before moving to Florida.  She has an open space at her dock behind her home and has so kindly offered it to us to leave the boat in while we travel back to Chicago for a couple of weeks.  We arrived at Betsy’s at 2:30 pm and she helped us tie up.

 

Betsy served us drinks and snacks which we ate by her pool in the large screened patio area off the rear of her house.  The house itself is a modern loft style and she has renovated the space to suit her needs.  Some passing rain showers fell around 5 pm.  This was the first rain we saw since we arrived in Miami on February 13^th. 

Later we went to Shrimper’s, a local waterfront seafood restaurant right across the channel from Betsy’s house and met an associate of Captain Randy’s, Ron Maglio, who Randy met through NACO (the National Association of Charterboat Operators). 

This was our last night in Florida before returning to Chicago again and it was good to be among friends.