Fort Pierce FL (2014-02-23)

N27° 27.933', W80° 17.756'

Tonight finds us peacefully at anchor in one of our favourite spots in Florida, Faber Cove anchorage in Fort Pierce.


We ended up staying for two days at Riviera Beach marina, mostly to spend another day visiting with our friends but also because we didn't really feel like moving on Wednesday.

Thursday morning we said good-bye to Barb and Jim on S/V Tan Dam.  They were heading up to Fort Pierce to drop their boat off at a marina there, where it would get listed with a broker to be sold.  They're looking at switching to a trawler for their future boating, so we were happy to share our experiences with them.  Hopefully we'll see them on the water again sometime in the future.

S/V Tan Dam leaving Riviera Beach marina

We left a little bit later and made our way back to the anchorage at the north end of Lake Worth.  It looked very much like it had when we left it.  There were about 15 boats in the anchorage, and M/V Griffin was still there, apparently having made the north Lake Worth anchorage their winter home.

M/V Griffin

We dropped the hook and got ourselves settled in, getting to the task at hand, doing some serious relaxing.  It's a hard job, but someone's got to do it. :-)  Sunsets like this make it worth the effort.

North Lake Worth sunset

Friday we took the dinghy in to the dinghy landing to do some grocery shopping.  It was much less busy now than it was in December.  We popped back in on Saturday as well so that Dar could get a haircut.  I took the opportunity to visit the West Marine while she was in the salon.  I managed to leave much less poorer than I normally would, after having visited a marine supplies store (aka, candy store :-)).  I limited myself to picking up a can of spray lubricant to deal with a couple squeaks that have developed, as well as a tube of metal cleaner to take care of our stainless steel, which is looking a little worse for it's time in a salt water environment.

North Lake Worth dingy landing

We had planned on leaving Lake Worth on Monday to head up to Fort Pierce.  The winds have been mostly southerly though, and strong enough during the day to make the anchorage a bit lumpy for our liking.  This morning the weather forecast was good for travelling on the ICW, so we decided to leave a day earlier than planned.

Common convention is that one doesn't travel on the ICW on the weekends unless one either has to, or really likes crowded waterways.  Knowing this we decided to head out today anyway, and the convention was very accurate.  In the stretch from Lake Worth to just past the St Lucie inlet there were boats big and small buzzing about in all directions.  It kind of reminded us of a typical long weekend on the Rideau. :-)

Jupiter Federal Bridge

Sand bar party

A Florida equivalent to our "Ice Cream Float" :-)

The St Lucie inlet ended up being the last busy spot we had to deal with for the day, but busy doesn't really do this spot justice.  There were boats headed north and south on the ICW, and boats running at full speed heading east and west to and from the inlet.  It was busy enough that it looked like it could benefit from a stop light! :-)

We managed to thread our way through the traffic without getting impaled, and a couple miles north of St Lucie the ICW was soon peaceful again.  A couple more hours travel and we were in Fort Pierce, and made the turn off of the ICW to Faber Cove.  We were pleasantly surprised to see that Faber Cove was empty, and that we had the anchorage to ourselves.

We'll spend a couple days here before making the short trip up to Vero Beach.  When we leave we'll make a quick stop at the Fort Pierce marina to fill our fuel tanks.  Fort Pierce marina has the best fuel prices for many miles in either direction on the ICW.  While we are quite low on fuel we are happy that we managed to do all of our Bahamas cruising without having to buy fuel in the Bahamas, where it is almost two dollars a gallon more than what we'll be paying for it here.