And we are off!  Left Vero Beach City Marina this morning at 8am.  We were sad to say goodbye to our new friends and dock neighbors, Rick and Kay, as well as other friends we made while there.  But we know we will stay in touch and share future adventures.  We loved our time in Vero and can see why it is sometimes called Velcro Beach - people come and end up sticking because they love it so much!

The week before we left, Greg's mom and sister were in town.  We had a great week sharing time with them.  We returned to McKee Gardens, visited the Art Museum and enjoyed a fair bit of beach time.  It was great to show them around town.

McKee Botanical Gardens

Today was a gorgeous day that gave us an opportunity to try out the boat's new navigation instruments.  While Sharon steered in circles more times than she could count, Greg read manuals and calibrated the new instruments.  The circling is supposed to calibrate the digital compass settings and the wind speed and direction instrument. At least fifteen circles later, he just calibrated manually.  Still not sure it is right, since it seemed that the wind was blowing somewhat more than the 16 recorded on the instrument.  Same for the depth.  We had our old depth sounder set so that it read from the bottom of the keel (showed how much water between our boat and the ground).  Since the installer set this one up, we weren't sure where it was reading, so we tried our best not to find any water below 5 feet (just in case).

One of the cool new things we have is AIS - Automatic Identification System.  This is required for any ships over 300 tons, as well as all passenger ships.  It's a radio transmitter and receiver that sends/receives boat information to other similarly equipped boats. So, when we are sailing at night, or in low visibility, we will see other ships in our area on our chart plotter (screen display in front of the wheel). We can see what it is, how large, how fast and what direction it's traveling.  We are also transmitting a signal, so they can see us too.  Isn't technology a wonderful thing?!

The big news in Vero Beach today is the arrival of the Nina and the Pinta.  These are two replicas of the originals that are touring the US.  They arrived in Vero Beach today and were to be docked right  where we have been docked these last couple months.  We passed them going north as we headed south.  We are kind of glad not to be around for the general public admission happening from the 6th to the 12th.  Check out the website here The Columbus Foundation.

It was a fairly uneventful day otherwise and we dropped the hook in Hobe Sound at about 4pm.  We are about halfway between Vero Beach and Boca Raton, where we will head tomorrow to spend a day with our daughter Courtney and her boyfriend, Paolo.  The trip tomorrow will involve getting through 19 bridges, so it will be a bit more eventful than the four we had to negotiate today.

We just discovered that SPOT didn't save our previous travels.  So we are starting anew.  For those of you just catching up, we left Newport on Sept 23, 2014 and arrived in Florida for Thanksgiving.  Sorry to lose that SPOT data.  We'll try to fix that and assure the track gets saved from now on.