It’s been a productive few days of decommissioning, schooling, and maximizing our last minutes in the warm sunshine.
From Peanut Island we steamed north a few miles to North Palm Beach, where we tucked into a marina for our initial days of desalting the boat and its parts. Our considerations for this stopover are heavy on the need for laundry facilities and a pool, so that I can pretend to help by throwing a few things in the wash before I spend the day at said pool entertaining the girls. Last year we found a great place to do so in Stuart, but Irma’s fury wiped out their transient slips, so our pool options were further south this time around.
The North Palm Beach Marina is welcoming, clean, and gives renters rights at the nearby NPB Country Club, complete with an Olympic-sized pool. As it’s just off the waterway, we were also able to dinghy to markets, waterside cafes and to nearby anchorages to look at other boats, one of our favorite past times.
Three nights there and we significantly upped our Palm Beach catalog of knowledge (including finding a great breakfast spot AND a yummy French bakery), saw two movies in a swank cineplex, toodled around a Whole Foods for the first time in ages, and spent some serious hours at the pool. (Andy also soaked lines, sprayed off all bits and pieces that have been salt-saturated for the past two months, and washed and stowed the mainsail. The girls were none-too-pleased to have their boom nest deconstructed, but they swam their sorrows away at the pool.)
After a peaceful day on the waterway (not too many boats and wakes, and we caught all but one bridge opening in time- a miracle!) we anchored in Peck Lake for our last non-boatyard night aboard. From the anchorage only 100 yards from the eastern shore, the waves crashing sounded like a freight train. The crazy thing is that there wasn’t any wind- it was a residual sea from the intensive northerly storm that our Maine island had just been hit with. We walked the beach, got knocked over by waves, and had our last sand experience of the cruise. (The term ‘sand experience’ likely gives Andy the heebie jeebies, given his sand-on-boat loathing. Plenty was stowed away in our suits and towels despite attempts to clean off, so as our last time this year, we sure ended with a winner!)
Almost to Indiantown, where we’ll unpack the car and unpack the boat so that we can repack the car and repack the boat (maddening good times!) before hauling tomorrow morning. So much to do, and such a wonderful time’s ending to mourn. The nature of the process makes it progressively less sad as we methodically pack the family cozy nest of Chickadee into their summer storage spots, and make the boat less homey and our car more so at the same time. The car means one last long road trip before the kids are released to the friendships they’ve missed, and closing in our our pets and friends and family that we’ve missed. But, the car is still a car and not the boat that gives our family so much, so we’ll take these last few hours on the Okeechobee to enjoy our dear vessel with much gratitude.
