Perserverence

Bill, sending us off.  Thanks Bill!

When we left the Cracker Boy dock, the Intracoastal Waterway quickly turned from feeling like a large bay to feeling like a narrow river in the everglades. 

The bird watching was spectacular.   A Peterson's Field Guide was all we had to go by but we did our best to put a name on some of the beauties we were seeing. Great blue herons and osprey are common here, as they are back home, but in much greater abundance.   I never tire of seeing them.  And turkey vultures abound here!   We also saw many new faces;  little blue heron, snowy egret, white ibis, great white heron, and yes, our beloved pelicans!  Mangrove forests crowded the banks on either side, providing amazing and essential habitat.  And yeah, there was as a mansion or two. 

Riley, scouting birds

Moon-rise over mansion

We had a steady following wind and were able to kill the engine, unfurl the jib, and sail for much of the afternoon.  I saw Scott finally relax for the first time since our arrival. 

Down wind on the jib

Scott, on auto pilot

Well... sort of.   He was as relaxed as he possibly could be considering our depth sounder was on the fritz He'd been tinkering with it a bit and had it working intermittently.  But intermittently just doesn't cut it around here.  The ICW (in this part of FL anyway) is very narrow and quite shallow.  If you veer too far off the channel, it shoals up to 2- 3 feet pretty quickly.  Kiawah drafts 5 feet with her centerboard up.  A working depth sounder is really an essential piece of equipment in these waters (and will be even more so when we get to the Bahamas).   We dropped the hook in Hobe Sound with plans to stay there a few nights so Scott could worked the bugs out of the navigation system, and the girls and I could go to shore and blow off some stink!  We'd been in Florida almost 3 weeks and the girls had yet to dig their toes into the white sand of a real beach!   And I hadn't run in two weeks.  The next day, we all took the dinghy ashore to explore.  Small stretches of sandy beach dotted the dense mangrove shoreline.  We followed a trail inland and by sheer serendipity we found ourselves at the Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge Nature Center.  What luck! 

The interpreter welcomed us and introduced us to the resident animals (see Ri and Wren's blog for more on that). 

baby croc and alligator

Afterward, we went for a hike on the trail system through a really unique sand pine scrub ecosystem to look for some of the same animals in the wild.  Finding a gopher tortoise in its burrow was certainly the highlight of the afternoon. (the mushrooms were pretty cool too).

Gopher tortoise, caught by the flash

Russula?

color coordinated

Hiking in the pine scrub sand

That, and finding a coconut.  The girls were thrilled with this exotic find and became obsessed with opening this unwelcoming fruit.  If you've ever tried to open a coconut, husk intact (without access to a machete), you know what I mean. 

coconut #1

Team effort

Scott and I were  justifiably alarmed when we saw them heading to Kiawah's fore deck, one carrying the coconut, the other carrying a hammer and chisel.   After much effort (and no apparent damage to Kiawah), coconut #1 turned out to be dry and empty inside.  They were disappointed but remained optimistic. The empty shell was determined to be "a perfect fairy house".   

Coconut #2 was procured the next day on another beach excursion but turned out to contain only rancid milk.  They were getting closer! The hunters were even more determined.  

coconut #2

In no time, they were in possession of SIX coconuts.  They chose the best candidate from the lot (after bowling on the beach with it all afternoon) and cracked it open...  a splash of milk... a flash of white...  Success!  They guarded the sweet flesh as if it were Halloween candy and gorged until it was gone. Victory was theirs.  If I'm ever stranded on a desert island, I want to be with them.

The chosen one

Strike!

:)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....  After a day of tangled wires and careful note taking, Scott experienced his own success.  He was able to re-route the depth sounder (bypassing the defunct digital display which would only show part of a number - is that 13 or 3 feet?  Hmmm...)  to the chart plotter at the helm.  Voila! It was a great moment when it worked.  I'll take him on my desert island too.

Red to yellow.  Green to white.  Purple to orange.  Gray to blue.

The navigation station at the helm.  Fully functional.