The Shakedown Cruise is over and The Greatloop Begins…
We are woefully 9 months behind in our Blog. My plan is to add as much text and pics as possible and get it caught up at a later date, for now, we will start from present day. Some of these old posts may go very quickly with just text. Others, may include a link to a slideshow with music that will show progress on projects or run a number of months together. That is for the last years travels. This years travels start below
John
Sunday, March 26 2017
Left Turkey Creek dock at 7:05. Ed, our neighbor across the canal, came over to help us with our lines. Mark and Becky from Mara Beel cruised over from Fort Myers on Saturday so that they can travel with us. They stayed on Hatch’s dock for the night. Hatch helped them get off his dock. Our stay at Turkey Creek was filled with a lot of hard work and a lot of good memories. LaVernes dock was perfect for the projects that we tackled this winter and we so appreciated him letting us use it. While we were there we attended a spaghetti dinner, a cane grinding festival, some Friday night happy hours and had some relaxing sunset dingy rides. The best part though was the wonderfully kind people that we met there. We appreciated Gary and Barb getting the docks ready for us and letting us get some mail delivered to their house when we first came. Joy and Jerry were available to assist us around the buildings that we needed to get into and always welcoming when we visited their beautiful home. April and Dean were one of the first people to come over and make us feel welcome. April constantly checked on us to see that things were going well with our projects and even brought us a little plant when we left. Sharon had me over for a much appreciated coffee break one morning while Mike would occasionally stop by to say hi. Joan and Mike invited us over for a great beef dinner and some insight on our upcoming Canada travels. Hatch let us borrow his trailer so that we could take our dingy to Fort Myers and get it serviced. Ed and Deb had us over for drinks, conversation, and support and loaned us their truck so that we could move our van over to our friends in Jupiter. Marge did an awesome job fixing our eisenglass and making new screens for our aft deck. She and Kenny had us over for drinks and let us have our mail and packages be sent to their house and even delivered it to our boat. We will miss these great people and hope to touch base with them again sometime. Turkey Creek was a diamond in the rough.
This was the dock we were on in Turkey Creek.
Mark and Becky From Mara Beel.
It feels great to be traveling with Mara Beel again. We have missed their sense of humor and positive attitudes. Becky is fighting a cold so she isn’t up to her usual funny quips yet.
This is John’s 5th (my 4th) trip through this waterway. We made it through the Moore Haven lock at 9:15 This lock only has a 2-3 ft drop so not a very long run. Right past the lock we came by a tow boat that was sinking and pumping water as fast as it could.
Between Moore Haven and Clewiston we saw well over 50 or more alligators. They were sunning themselves on the shore and swimming across the waterway. John’s head was on a swivel as he looked all around for these interesting crittters. We even saw a 8-10 foot dead one floating on the water with a bird sitting on him enjoying breakfast.
Got to Clewiston at 10:50. This is the start of the Lake Okeechobee western entrance. The Lake was pretty smooth today. As we have been traveling we have noticed that the boat isn’t tracking very well and the steering is really tight. Since we were planning on heading into Stuart to have some cosmetic things fixed, we decided to have them look at these problems so John called Greg to give him a heads up on our problems.
The Port Mayaca lock is at the other end of the Lake. Since the water level is pretty high right now, the lock is open and you just slowly cruise through it. We got to the lock around 1:50
We arrived at River Forest Stuart at 4:30. The winds had picked up a great deal so we decided to take the wall on the starboard side to let the wind pushes up against the wall for an easier dockage. We sprayed off the boat and had Becky and Mark over to our boat for dinner.