Riviera Beach to Stuart Yachts to Fort Pierce

Day #169; Loop miles to date = 2,030

Warning...this first 2 paragraphs are boring boat geek stuff!

On Wednesday, we made our way to Stuart Yacht for our scheduled haul-out on Thursday. We had 2 items that we wanted to accomplish and both were completed by mid-afternoon on Friday. The first of these was to pull the rudder again and re-orient the rudder components. We found that the way it had been installed last visit did not allow us to add packing to the seal and this just didn't make sense. In short, we moved the stop collar to the outside of the hull and located it just above the rudder shaft zinc. Now we can get access to the top of the shaft seal to service it as needed down the road.

The second item was to replace our raw water pump on our Cummins engine. The original pump was showing signs of leakage, which is a precursor to pump failure. This specific pump has a life expectancy of 800 to 1200 hours, and we have almost 2000 hours on the engine, so we definitely got our money's worth out of this original! The new pump is supposed to be an improved design, and we expect it to last for a long time.

We were happy to catch up to our friends on InSpeyered 2 in Stuart...we think this might be one of their adopted homes now (just kidding). They were in for some additional work, and it was great to spend some time with them while in Stuart. They are off to the Bahamas soon, and we are headed north, so it was nice to have our paths cross for a visit.

On Saturday, we ventured back to the ICW (15 miles or so from the boat yard) and made our way to Fort Pierce. We had a very pleasant day on the water, with great weather. Everything that had been worked on at the boat yard worked to perfection, and we even had some dolphins perform in our wake for us for awhile...much fun!

On the way out of the St Lucie River from the boat yard, we passed a couple of crew teams practicing. We speculated that these were perhaps college teams who had traveled to Florida over Spring break to practice in the nice warm weather.

We had 3 or 4 dolphin playing in our wake in the ICW on the way to Fort Pierce for about 10 minutes. It NEVER gets old!

We knew we were roughly on the same time schedule as our friends on Corkscrew, as they were also headed to the same marina from a different starting point. And we were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves parked right down the dock from them when we arrived! They are here for the weekend too, and then we might even have the next stop in common as well. Additionally, we stumbled across our friends from Liquid Assets who were visiting by car. And there are probably other loopers here...it is a pretty big marina.

We also discovered that we had landed at Fort Pierce City Marina at exactly the right moment. On Saturday night there was a music festival directly at the end of our dock in the marina parking lot, on Easter morning there was a sunrise service on the water not more than a 2 minute walk away, and on Sunday afternoon there is also a small jazz and blues festival nearby.

All in all, we've had a very successful and pleasant week. Now tomorrow we are off to Vero Beach to see what that's all about...stay tuned and Happy Easter!