New Smyrna to Cape Canaveral, Feb 1, 2022

      Dawn broke quietly as we gently bobbed around the waters of Ponce de Leon Inlet.  I made some espresso and waved to the early morning fishermen as they headed out in search of fresh catch.  Lisa was not far behind and I quickly went through our departure checklist.  I had the engines running before she was even finished with her first cup of coffee, but I promised that she could stay inside toasty warm once we got underway.  I had just done this path the night before and I was confident that it would be no real challenge today.  We expected our journey to take around 10 hours and we didn't want to leave any potential for drama should something go a bit long, so I wanted to get going nice and early.

     Fortunately, leaving from an anchorage is a lot quicker and easier than from a dock.  When you are a dock, you have usually four or five dock lines to manage as well a number of inflatable fenders (little bumpers that protect your boat from damage when it gets pushed against the dock).  When we pull out of a dock, Lisa usually has 30 minutes or so of chores putting everything away and packing things up neatly.  Its a bit of a faux pas to leave fenders out and you don't want you boating neighbors laughing at you.  When you hoist the anchor, there is a little bit of effort as you pull it up and put away the bridle and tackle, but as soon as it is done, you can duck back into the relatively warm cabin.  Lisa didn't waste much time in the morning chill and raising the anchor was especially quick because we had so little chain out anyhow.

     As we were heading out, a boat at anchor was chasing themselves with a drone, shooting action shots of the boat underway.  For the 1000th time, I thought to myself that I should get a drone.

     We were pretty sure that there was no scheduled launch today, but we still listened very closely to the radio all morning.  Unlike the day before where the stern warnings to avoid the prohibited zone were issued at least twice an hour, today the Coast Guard was nice and quiet.  Just the usual twice a day announcements about missing buoys and the like.  

     The fun thing about heading down Cape Canaveral is that you can see the massive buildings associated with the rockets and the large launch towers for a very long time.  Eventually, we caught site of the next SpaceX launch sitting at the pad waiting to blast off.  If things worked out in our favor, we hoped to watch it take off from even closer than our vantage point the day before.

 SpaceX Falcon-9 on the pad ready to launch, seen from the heart of the "forbidden zone"

     The marina we were heading to was actually a private yacht club that leased room on their docks to transient boaters on a space available basis and the whole process was quite a bit more homey than the typical marina.  As I made my way down the coast, I got a text from the marina manager saying that she couldn't be there to meet us, but she gave us the phone number of "Ralph" who she promised would be there to assist.  We traded texts and it turned out that my slip was immediately in front of his Lagoon catamaran, so he just jumped ashore and caught the line when I pulled up.  He gave us some fine tuning of the directions and we were able to get settled in to our new slip without incident.  The information online said that the club had only fixed docks that didn't float up and down and we were planning for some fun climbing onto Dragonfly, but it turns out that the very end of the dock did float, so it was actually easy to clamber on and off.

The cruise ship that caused all the drama was hiding, although he eventually parked right across from us.

Location: Port Canaveral, FL 32920, USA

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