The delay of the Space Shuttle launch to December 16th meant that we could see it from Titusville, which is just across the ICW from Cape Canaveral. It took us two days to get there from St. Augustine, with a stop midway at Daytona Beach. This stretch was characterized by bunches of bridges, copious wildlife, and a good deal of shallow water.
Most of the bridges through this section are "on demand", which means that they will open any time for boats. Whenever we called a bridge on VHF, the bridgetender would respond, "Bring it on up, Captain, and I'll open for you." Clearly the bridgetenders have lots of practice and experience timing their openings, because if we had had the guts to stay on the throttle right up to the bridge we would probably have arrived exactly as the bridge was ready. But of course each time we got close to a bridge we'd slow down; then the bridge would open faster than expected and we'd pour on the speed, the bridge standing open waiting for us, and we'd feel a teeny bit guilty about all those cars idling behind the barriers.
Just south of our anchorage at Daytona were three drawbridges very close together: Main Street Bridge and Broadway Bridge, which are on demand, followed by Memorial Bridge, which stays closed during morning rush hour except for one opening at 8:15. We decided to get moving a little early, along with our friends Alex and Penelope on Odyssey, to make that one opening, so we lifted anchor at 8 and headed for the first bridge. The first went up right away, but the second had to delay a minute or so to clear traffic before opening for us. As we cleared the second bridge, we heard a call on the VHF:
"Sailboats passing through Broadway Bridge, this is Memorial Bridge."
I was driving, so Britt grabbed the cockpit radio. "This is the first sailboat."
"You better get your butts moving or you'll miss the opening. You got two minutes!"
Our clock said we had four minutes, but Britt knew better than to argue. "Yes, ma'am!"
Ok, maybe she said, "get your boats moving." We got both butts and boats in gear, and didn't slow down at all as she lifted the draw span exactly at 8:15 and we motored through.
The bird life in Florida is something to behold. Every piling of every dock has a bird on it, each fencepost doubles as a perch, and each structure holds a variety of species, ten or twelve different types of bird, from pelican to gull to osprey. It's really fun to watch the pelicans dive-bombing for lunch, or the ospreys flying off with a meal in their claws.
We've also seen quite a few dolphins. Just past the Haulover Canal, two dolphins swam beside our boat for several minutes, streamlining in our turbulent side-wake, jumping out of the water every so often. They were moving so easily it seemed as though the water was flowing across them, rather than that they were swimming through the water. The problem with dolphins playing next to the boat is that we tend to watch them, rather than watching the depthsounder and the daymarks, and the next thing we know, we're out of the channel. Oops.
We'd love to see some manatees. We're in manatee water; there are signs on the daymarks warning boaters to slow down and watch carefully. So far, though, we haven't seen any. One nice thing about manatee territory is that the signs keep the powerboaters moving slowly. Maybe there aren't really any manatees, and the signs were just placed by some clever sailors who were fed up with powerboat wakes. I don't know, but we'll keep looking.
The lagoons and rivers that the waterway follows through this area have been very wide but also very shallow, so we're restricted to a narrow dredged channel. The "project depth" for the ICW is 12 feet, but in a few places the last couple of days we've been lucky to see double digits.
We had a note in our guidebook about one particularly bad spot near the Ponce de Leon inlet, which had only 7 feet at low tide; according to SSB reports we'd gotten a few weeks back, it was even worse, with spots under 6 feet within an hour each side of low tide. As we approached, about two hours after low, we saw a TowBoat US boat idling nearby. Just like we'd seen in a few other tricky spots, those guys are ambulance chasers! We hugged the new green buoys -- oddly, the matching reds we'd heard were there were missing -- and didn't see anything under 11.5 feet, so we didn't think to warn Odyssey, a little behind us.
They called us on VHF a minute later. They'd hit bottom, and hit very hard -- right in the middle of the channel. It turns out that the new reds marking the right side of the channel were removed for dredging, and the dredging had apparently piled up some bottom sand between the existing red marks. The towboat was already racing toward them. We offered to drop anchor and come help out by dinghy, but they have towing insurance so decided to let the towboat do it. It just took a couple minutes for the boat to pull them off, but three times as long for them to fill out the paperwork. Later they told us what the official charge was -- $586! We are glad we didn't know it cost so much until we were almost finished with the ICW, because we would have been a lot more uncomfortable in shallow water...which is most of the waterway. So far, we've only hit bottom a couple of times, and we were able to get off on our own, perhaps because our feathering prop gives us good power in reverse. But if we do it again, the $85 for towing insurance is beginning to sound better and better.
Lots of cruisers were in Titusville for the launch. We recognized several boats from our previous stops, and lots of boat names from the SSB morning net. We rented a car with our friends on Odyssey and spent all day Wednesday at Kennedy Space Center. The visitor's center there is sort of Disneyesque; unsurprising, since Orlando isn't very far away, and most of the other people there seemed to be visiting Kennedy as a "Space Land" part of their Disney World vacation. The entrance fee, too, was more suited to a theme park than to a NASA facility, but there were lots of cool things to see and we had a great time. One highlight was the Apollo/Saturn V Center, with a 363-foot Saturn V rocket hanging from the ceiling. According to one of the plaques, its fuel tanks were so well insulated that if one was filled with ice, it would take over eight days for the ice to melt. I need some of that stuff for my boat refrigerator!
We had gotten tickets to ride a bus out to a special "launch viewing area", but when we showed up at the visitor's center the next evening we found that the launch had been postponed until the next day. It's now that next day, December 17th, and it's been raining since noon. NASA information says there's only a 20% chance they won't scrub because of weather. If they do go tonight, we'll just poke our heads out of the boat, as we'd originally planned to do; if they don't, we'll see if we can get out to the viewing site for tomorrow's last chance launch date. If they don't get Discovery off the ground by tomorrow evening, the launch will be postponed until January. By then -- we hope -- we will also have "blasted off" to the Bahamas.