Lake Worth FL (2013-12-18)

N26° 50.414', W80° 03.166'

We have reached Lake Worth FL, our final destination on the ICW, and our staging point for the crossing over to the Bahamas.  Another leg in our journey is now complete.
We decided to stay an extra day in Ft Pierce to sit out the passage of a cold front through the region.  We had scattered showers most of the day and then in the afternoon as the cold front approached the rain became torrential and we had about an hour of thunderstorms.  We heard later that a tornado had touched down near Palm Coast, just north of Daytona Beach.

Monday morning we headed out of the cove and made our way back to the ICW.  We had a bit of a breeze from the north and clear sunny skies for most of the day.  Overall it was a great day for our last day's travel on the ICW.

When we reached Lake Worth and made the turn to enter the anchorage we saw that there were already quite a few boats at anchor.  We circled around the anchorage, found a spot we liked and dropped the hook.  We did a quick survey of the other boats in the anchorage and found that there were 35 sailboats and 4 powerboats.  We also counted 12 Canadian boats (including us) and one flying a British flag.

This will be our home for the next few days while we wait for favourable conditions for a crossing of the Gulf Stream.  Basically we need light winds from any direction except northerly, preferably westerly, and for the waves to drop down to a comfortable level.  So far it looks like we're going to be waiting at least until the weekend.

We'll take this down time to start provisioning for our time in the Bahamas.  Everything costs more in the Bahamas, so we're going to fill the boat with as much non-perishables goods as we can.  Luckily there is a Publix grocery store a short distance away from the dinghy landing at the north end of the anchorage, as well as a West Marine not much further than that.

We have some assistance available to us though.  The friends we were visiting with in Hilton Head, Don and Lynn from S/V Redshift (we met them this summer near Gananoque) are currently vacationing in a time share in West Palm Beach for the rest of the week, and have graciously volunteered to shuttle us around in their car.