November 23. Yesterday was Thanksgiving and it rocked, there were over 200 people at the cruisers Thanksgiving dinner.




It was held in a hall that is adjacent to the marina here in Vero Beach. It’s especially nice since you can dinghy right up to the place. There was a sign up sheet at the marina so you could see what food items were being brought, and you could fill a need that presented itself.

Christy waited until the day before to see what items might be lacking. She ended up bringing a huge pan of stuffing and a tray of brownies, for dessert. There were several turkeys, potatoes, stuffing, corn, rolls, salads, casseroles, cranberry sauce, baked hams and more desserts than you could name. It truly was a feast. I’m already looking forward to next year.

While we were on our way up to the hall for dinner we saw a sailboat that had been moored close to us, leaving. The special thing about this boat was the fact that they had 2 huge bright yellow, heavy bags hanging from their mast. It looked to me as if they were full of water. Others thought they might be some type of flopper stopper system. The 2 huge bags looked like a pair of giant testicles. Evidently that’s what they were......

Once they were underway the purpose of the bags became obvious. We came to find out that the boats mast was in the neighborhood of 80 feet tall. The bridge immediately south of Vero is only 65 feet tall. The crew had a system that allowed the bags to swing off to the starboard side of the boat and as the bags swung the boat started to heel in that direction. Once the boat started heeling the bags wanted to swing even more. They had a line running parallel to the waters surface which controlled how far out the bags could swing away from the boat. As the boat heeled more and more, the bags finally reached the waters surface. Once there, it was the signal that the mast was sufficiently tilted to allow them to pass safely under the 65 foot bridge. It was crazy to see but evidently they’ve been doing this all the way down the ICW, under every fixed bridge and low hanging power line.




They had everyone’s attention as they heeled their boat and slipped under the bridge. Fishermen along the shore all stopped what they were doing and all the power boats and dinghies came to a halt to watch the spectacle. Cameras were flashing like crazy, another boat had asked the owners about their system and then commented that they had guts to travel that way and their commented was “NO, we have balls”!!!!!!