Scott here. We made it to West Palm Beach! We stopped at the North City Dock downtown. Biggest problem with that dock was the support posts are on the outside of the dock and are about 45 feet apart. Well, our boat is 42′ plus another 3′ or so for the dinghy davit system. Tight fit! Did I say it was blowing about 13 mph pushing us away from the dock as we came in?

I did hear from Rita that it was slightly terrifying! Another time when it takes a lot of work to dock. I needed to get Rita close enough to the dock at the stern of the boat for her to jump off with the aft line. Yet, not get the bow too close to the support post so we don’t bend the railing. The railing did touch, but I was able to keep it from causing damage. It took us a good 20 minutes to tie the lines and arrange the fenders to keep the boat safe.

We met with our West Palm Beach friends and took delivery of way too many Amazon and other delivery boxes! They then dropped us off at Walmart so we could do our final provisioning before heading to the Bahamas. After spending more money than we ever have before in one trip to get groceries, we called an Uber to get us back to the boat. Of course, there is a big event downtown so we were dropped off 3 blocks away from the boat. I made one trip carrying some heavy stuff. On the way back, I asked one of the food venders if I could borrow their dolly. I offered my driver’s license or my wife as collateral since she had to stay by our pile of food to make sure it didn’t walk away! They took my driver’s license and let me use their dolly. Rita is not offended that they didn’t want to keep her. I needed three trips with the dolly for water, soda, oil, etc. We did stop by their booth on our nighttime walk with Jazzy and bought some of their food. Oh, I may have explained to them what we were doing as well. They were fascinated. I do enjoy talking about what we are doing.

We moved off the city dock since we couldn’t stay there for the night. The anchorages are pretty full around here, but that’s not surprising. We tried one spot and we just were not comfortable with how close we were to the boat behind us. Pull anchor and try another spot. We see a large open area and head there. We figured out it was wide open once we touched bottom. We don’t like it when that happens! No damage, backed out, went to spot #3. We couldn’t get the anchor to set and head to spot #4. It took a few tries, but we were able to get the anchor to catch and we have been pretty solid.

We will be here two nights. Friday afternoon we have Jazzy’s vet appointment, and we will be heading to Fort Lauderdale Saturday morning.

How did real life compare with our plan?

Start at: 9:00 am ACTUAL 8:30 AM
End at: 1:00 pm ACTUAL 12:15 PM
Total Time: 3 hours (2:41 travel time + a little for No Wake zones) ACTUAL 3:37 (INCLUDES DOCKING TIME)
Distance: 24.2 miles ACTUAL 24.0

Going from the city dock to the anchorage:
Start: No planned time ACTUAL 5:11 PM
End: No planned time ACTUAL 6:00 PM
Total Time: No planned time ACTUAL 00:48
Distance: No plan ACTUAL 1.1 MILES