We had left Stuart on Friday morning traveling a short distance to anchor in Peck Lake. This was an unusal spot as the charts are out of date and indicate depths too shoal to anchor. However our guidebook promised adequate depth if you followed some tricky instructions and crossed your fingers and toes for good measure. I'm so glad we stopped as it turned out to be one of our favorite places. It was only a short row to the land the dinghy, then walk across a short trail and ta dah the most beautiful beach stretched literally for miles each way. No other way to get there than anchoring in Peck Lake so as you can imagine there were only a handful of people. Just my kind of beach. It's part of the Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge, home to myraid birds, including some least terns, and a hatching place for sea turtles, too.
We enjoyed some great beach time. I managed a 6 mile walk where I snagged two awesome buckets that had washed ashore. This was a great find as I had just lost a bucket two days earlier when the handle broke while I was attempting to wash mud off the anchor chain. Sadly, you can almost always find a bucket on the beach, along with mismatched shoes and flip flops. I've yet to find a matched set. Anyway, I digress....
We also spent a day gunkholing in the dinghy. I had this great idea that we'd find the Hobe Sound Visitors Center that I'd read about on their website, thinking perhaps that it was just across the channel and down a canal. So we loaded up the dinghy for a short ride, dreaming about ice cream, cold sodas and such. Wrong! The channel led to a private yacht club and a bunch of condos. Bummer. Not being the sort that gives up easily, we decided to head up the river and look some more. Hence the gunkholing began. We ended up in some amazing beautiful places forgetting entirely about our quest for the visitors center. We alternately used the dinghy motor and took turns rowing quietly or just drifting. Sometimes we could hear the surf just on the other side of the mangroves. We floated quietly past a huge flock of ibis all tucked in the mangrove branches, more than I've ever seen in one place. We saw an osprey sitting in a highly perched nest, a Little Blue Heron, scores of brown pelicans, a couple of dolphins and a sea turtle. Then we started to get hungry as it was way past lunch time. It would have been a great place to whip out a few sandwiches from the backpack and drift along and eat, but I did not think ahead. The crew was highly disappointed as I almost always bring food on such expeditions.
We hauled in the hook early Monday morning after taking the dog to shore for a quick walk. After making plans to meet up in a week or two we headed south, while DJ turned north back to Stuart where he had a job waiting. We had only traveled about a 1/4 mile when what did we see but the Vistors Center! We were headed to Peanut Island a little island park in Lake Worth. It was a lovely trip speckled alternately with mansions and wilderness. We had a couple of tricky draw bridges with crabby bridge tenders, but overall it wasn't too bad. We turned the corner from the protected canal into the very choppy, windy Lake Worth around 2 p.m. We had thought to anchor in the same spot at Peanut Island as we did last year while waiting to jump to the Bahamas. I tried my best to get in that same spot but after setting the hook and drifting back to 4.5 feet I chickened out, pulled it back up and turned tail. We anchored admist all the other hundred boats in the very exposed area just outside the turning basin. It was a pretty uncomfortable place to end up after a days work!
We somehow managed to get the motor on the dink and took a wild ride to Peanut Island. It was like being on a roller coaster. Once again we were dreaming of ice cream at the Visitors Center and guess what! Closed on Mondays! Hugely disappointed we took a long walk around the island. I cheered up the crew saying we'd stop at the marina across the channel on the way back as we needed to get gas for the dinghy. We remembered they had ice cream when we stopped there last year. Guess what! They closed at 5 and we missed it by 10 minutes. No ice cream and more importantly no gas. We had a full tank (about a 1/4 gallon) and it was enough to get us back to the boat. Another wild ride, this time upwind and wet. We were all soaked, dog included, by the time we got back on board. As I was too tired to cook, it was a ham sandwich dinner, but at least it was on fresh homemade bread.
To be continued.........