End of Day 4 - Boca Raton Resort and Club - Roughing it the way it was meant to be

Today was a great day, an exhausting day, a frustrating day and a fantastic evening all rolled into one.  I must say the sights and experiences are starting to blend together which makes blogging it so very helpful.  It would be a shame to have all of this mushed up into a general experience remembering only the very highest points, of which there actually were more than a few.  How th is day started is important but most important was how it finished which is what I cover first here.

The real treat came after we decided to push to make Boca Raton once we arrived at Palm Beach. Looking at our cruise book we decided to call the Boca Raton Resort and Club to see if they would take a transient. If you know about these parts you know there are two places to see and be seen in Boca Raton, The Breakers and the Boca Resort and Club. The Yacht Basin lady was so very pleasant and helpful over the phone, taking our credit card information since we would arrive late. "Does your boat exceed 100 feet?" she asked, to which I responded if you lay it end to end three times, it does. I guess I caught her on a good day. Around 75 bucks and we got the full run of the place. This was originally the Ritz-Carlton Boca Raton back in the day, and I mean back in the 20's, and is now part of the Waldorf collection. It is beautiful; you know, the kind of place were all the walls have pictures of rich dead people doing fun stuff 80 years ago. You've got to go to their site and look the place over  http://www.bocaresort.com/   Their pictures barely do it justice.  And the four of us stayed there for about $80.  The Yacht basin lady very apologetically told me it would cost a little over $2 per foot to park the boat (their stayovers are usually much longer and don't stay on the boat.)  But we did! The funny thing is I could have parked the boat lengthwise in the WIDTH of the slip!  Our Yacht Basin bretheren were, well, bigger that we were; generallly about 3X our size.  My thought was BossSea looked like what happens when the other boats spawn.  The boat in the background was easily 100 feet and beautiful! You can see in the second pic that it was a humbling place to park. 











Candy couldn't resist the bathing beauty pose. It works for me!

 If you will notice, the Lazzara in the background, which might normallly look smaller because it is further away still looks like a ship, not a boat.  Well....it was.  Beautiful.  you can see here too that our blue slip mate was...biggish!

Stinky and sweaty we immediately walked right up to the swanky-est steak restaurant they had and proceed to have an amazing feast as we talked about what a tiring day it was on the Polo grounds. Well, not really but it was fun to give them our resort charge cards that listed BossSea in the Yacht basin. Heh, heh, little did they know that BossSea looked more like what got spawned from the 100 footers on either side of us!

This day actually started off in Cocoa with beautiful weather.  We needed to stop for fuel right away because of the late arrival in Cocoa the night before and the fact that the marina where we stayed did not have fuel pumps.  Am I ever glad they didn't because it required us to make a stop for fuel in what turned out to be one of the most beautiful "everyday" places just 10 miles or so South of Cocoa.  This picture shows the cove into which we motored to fill the tanks at a great little marina.  I say it is everyday beauty because it is everywhere around us in this amazing part of the state.  A picture of the cove shows the calm beauty in the early morning hours today.

The thing that keeps going through my mind is, I thought I knew Florida.  Candy is a native, we were married here and spent our first 10 years together in the state.  I graduated from the Univ. of So. Florida in Tampa, etc, etc.  Anyone who has ever known us has known that no matter where we have lived, and that includes Tennessee, Georiga, Florida, California, Wisconsin (and Minnesota by default) and now almost 20 years in Missouri, that we have always considered Florida "home".  But I and so many others have never really seen Florida like we are seeing it on this trip.  After departing Cocoa and proceeding once again through some of the most beautiful National Seashore areas North of Vero Beach, we cleared Vero by about noon.  I couldn't soak in enough of the beauty of the place. Central Florida, Disney and the likes,  is not Florida, THIS is Florida.

As we passed through Vero Beach I was reminded by a small plane passing overhead of my first encounter with Vero Beach.  It was 1978 and I was finishing all of the requriements to get my pilot's license which reqired a long cross country flight with two intermediate stops.  In my case it was fly from Pilot Country Estates North of Tampa, to Vero Beach, land and get my logbook signed by the Vero FBO then fly to Ft. Myers, do the same and fly back to PCE.  I could write a book about that trip including follwing a Piper on downwind, base leg and final that I NEVER saw, not once!  God was watching out for me and / or that other pilot.  And here we are 31 years later going by the airport, only this time in the water.  Vero is easy to miss from the Intracoastal.  Not much to see except the homes start getting a bit more elegant and larger.  The day was filled with beautiful unspoiled paradise interspersed with tacky old Florida homes on the waterway then patches like this:

We made Sebastian Inlet on the Intracoastal quicker than we thought.  This is where one would normally cut across the state through the Ocheechobee Waterway across lake Ocheechobee and out into the Gulf at Ft. Myers.  I called the Corp of Engineers this morning to see if the Waterway was open yet. (As I mentioned before it has been closed all summer for lock construction).  Well, they said it will likely open Thursday, maybe even Wednesday.  Sounded like Fools Gold to me so we continued South.  Only, we made a mistake and decided to go out through Sebastial Inlet and take the "outside" route again (as if the St. Augustine run on Sunday wasn't enough of a lesson.)  I now know that BossSea is not an ocean going boat.  She is too short.  There is not question though that she will make a great coastal cruiser on the Gulf coast. After an hour and a half of pounding and fighting to keep the boat planed and tracking straight in southeasterly swells, we re-entered the Intracoastal route through Ft. Worth Inlet at Palm Beach.  It was there that we began to experience bridge opening Hell!  There is no way to time the many low bridges to make it to them at the right time to allow opening either on the hour and half hour or on the quarter and three quarter hour.  Bridge tenders, bless their hearts, they for that brief moment of time every 30 minutes while the rest of us just endure.  I like the open on command stuff type on the St. Johns.  Now THAT was the way it was meant to be.  I think they get more sophisticated on the coast and decided to aggravate both the boater and driver.  Figures.  The good news is that during the hanging around waitin' on the bridge to open blues we called the Boca Raton Resort and Club and decided to push to Boca.  Pushing to Boca was one reason the blog didn't get posted at the end of the day.  The other was the fantastic dinner, amazing amenities, nice swim in the pool, etc as previously described.  What can I say?  It was all about us after four days on the water after enduring bridge roulette!  As it turned out, the next morning started out with a bridge flashback and went up hill from there.  It was a fantastic day going from Boca Raton to Islamorada in the Keys by way of South Beach Miami, as noted in the following blog.