Tonight we are securely tied up to a mooring ball, in what is probably one of the most iconic cruiser locations in Florida, Vero Beach, aka Velcro Beach.
We had planned to stay another day in Faber Cove but this morning we noticed that the vacant lot we had used for accessing shore back in December now had a couple of shiny new "Private Property" signs affixed to two of the property's palm trees, facing the water. The message behind these two new signs is pretty much unmistakable. Wanting to get to shore to stretch our legs today, but not wanting to step into any sticky situations with potential trespassing violations, we decided to head out for Vero Beach today instead.
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| Not the best picture, but the two new signs are on the palm trees |
We made our fuel stop at Fort Pierce marina, filling up with diesel, refilling one of our 5 gallon gas cans, and topping up our water tanks.
While we were there we got to check off another of our bucket list items, and that was to see a manatee in the wild. While we were getting set up to start refueling I noticed first one and then a second manatee entering the marina harbour. I called out to Dar and she grabbed the camera to try to get a picture.
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| Manatee ducking under the little floating dock |
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| On his way to see if any of the boaters have any fresh water to spare |
After refuelling we headed north on the ICW, bound for Vero Beach, two hours away. Oh, and the reason I referred to it at the start of this post as "Velcro Beach" is a bit of an inside joke with cruisers. This place has a great marina, a large mooring field and the rates for both are very competitive, especially for the mooring balls. There's a free bus that runs by the marina once an hour that has grocery stores, hardware stores, and a West Marine along it's route. If you can't get to where you need to on that bus, you can transfer to another one, and between the half dozen or so different routes you can get to pretty much anywhere in the city of Vero Beach for free. On top of that there's also a great beach here, many good restaurants and bars, as well as a variety of entertainment. Best of all the people here are very cruiser friendly. With so much going for it, it's no wonder that many cruisers show up for a few days and end up staying much longer. This is where the Velcro Beach nickname comes from. Just do a google search for "Velcro Beach" and you'll find many links in blog after blog with the term.
As for us, well, we started off planning to stay here a few days and within a half hour of being here that had already tentatively grown to a week. Tomorrow we'll go ashore and do some exploring and see what this town really has to offer. If it lives up to all the hype then I'm sure we'll probably still be here in a week and maybe even a bit longer...
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