January 15

January 15 (if that’s Mondays date). We wanted to be the first boat to the fuel dock this morning as we had heard a lot of people talking about leaving Vero Beach this morning so we were at the fuel dock when it opened at 0700. There was a 50 foot power boat spending the night on the dock so we were only able to squeeze half of our boat in but it was good enough and after taking on 150 gallons of water, 3 gallons of gasoline for the dinghy and 46 gallons of diesel we were on our way.

The trip south to Peck Lake was an uneventful 36 miles. The water is definitely turning much more beautiful shades of blue and green. Christy was taking a shower and Rover and I were steering the boat when I saw a pod of dolphins playing ahead of us. I grabbed the camera and left Rover in charge and went forward to get some dolphin on the bow photos. I took a couple of great shots; I even had a dolphin roll to his side and smile for me. I spent a good portion of the day bragging to Christy about the pictorial treat she was in for this evening. I uploaded all the photos and came to the realization that photography is not my strong suit. Damn. I was sure they were going to be Life Magazine quality.

On the charts Peck Lake is just a section of the ICW with a wide body of very shallow water on both sides. It’s charted as 1 to 2 feet deep on both charts we had for the area and also in our chart plotter. According to Skipper Bob (RIP) there is a path into a deeper pocket of water that is big enough for a few boats to spend the night. We follow the directions and are able to get within 60 yards of the shore and drop the hook in 10 feet of water. After us, a few more boats arrived and now we have our own little anchorage of 8 boats. The attraction of Peck Lake is that once you dinghy ashore you are less than a hundred yards from the ocean. It’s very much like the arrangement at Tices Shoal except that the ocean is much closer. We can hear it crashing ashore as we sit on our boat.

We walked the ocean front and did a little shelling before being forced back to the boat by some ominous looking rain clouds. The weather is supposed to turn ugly tomorrow night so we will being making a short run to Lake Worth and will probably end up spending 2 nights there to wait out the storm front.