Almost Home

Daybreak in St Augustine, Florida.
We are off, headed south once again.
 There is an easy inlet with a short run offshore until
you can turn south down the beach.
We have a long day ahead of us,
 we plan on going to Ft. Pierce to get fuel
and then go down a good stretch of the ICW to Stuart. 

The St. Augustine lighthouse.
Ginny and I have really enjoyed seeing all the different designs
on the different lighthouses as we have headed down the coast.

The next building we saw from our vantage point offshore
was the Vehicle Assembly Building in Cape Canaveral.
This place is huge, while Ginny used a lens on her camera
 to get this picture we were at least five miles away, very, very big.

We made it to Stuart and here we go the next morning at daybreak again,
 us and a bunch of fishing boats. what a start to the day.

Today we are going across the state of Florida
on the Okeechobee Waterway.
 The shortcut across the state is a part of the ICW
and contains five locks, two rivers , two canals and one large lake.
For those, like Ginny and I that are admirers of
  Patricks Smith's "A Land Remembered"
we are entering a very different Florida.

The first of the five locks,
the St Lucie Lock is just past the Interstate and the Florida Turnpike
but it could be a million miles away.

A herd of horses bathing and frolicking in the waterway,
not something you see everyday from a fifty foot boat.

Lake Okeechobee.
This lake has been likened to a saucer of water
because it is so wide yet so shallow.
 It takes very little to disrupt the calm surface
 and can be downright ugly but today it is a mirror as we cross.

In the hurricane recounted in the book "A land Remembered"
over three thousand people died when the waters of Lake Okeechobee
 spilled it's banks and flooded all the lands to the south of the lake.
Today there are gates and a system of water controls and
dikes to protect the communities surrounding the lake.
Behind this gate is the town of Clewiston,
home to US Sugar and a lot of sugar cane!

I would feel pretty secure hiding behind these dikes.
This is the ICW running alongside the structure.

Looking the other way you see miles and miles of freshwater grasses
 and then hammocks of trees when you pass a spot of high ground.

We actually made it to our home grounds,
 here we are tied up to our favorite dock.
Useppa Island.
A great dinner and visit with friends and
we head north for a change to get home to Palmetto the next day.

As much fun as its been all the way from the Connecticut River
 to the West Coast of Florida it is always nice to get home.
(Cheek out connectingpieces.blogspot.com
for more nature pics of our trip.)
It has been fun sharing this journey with our friends,
we loved the trip, the boat and all the great places we got to see.
I'm sure we have a lot of adventures ahead of us in the new boat!
Thanks for visiting with us here,
we hope you have enjoyed half as much as we have!