Florida's Space Coast

We left Ft. Pierce and headed to a beautiful anchorage at Serenity Island just south of Melbourne, FL. Very quiet with a beautiful sunset. We then spent a couple nights at Cocoa Village Marina. Very nice spot and a close walk to an old Florida town with one of the oldest continuously operating hardware stores in Florida – S.F. Travis Company, still using the original building built in 1891. Our next day (3/9/23) took us to the NASA Launching Anchorage, where we stopped for a few hours to watch the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral to take OneWeb satellites into space. We were about 6 miles away and it was a very cool thing to see. We also saw the Falcon booster rocket come back and land on earth…..amazing! We spent 2 nights at Titusville Municipal Marina. We enjoyed a wonderful breakfast with Ed & Sue Rowley, who are long time family friends that we’ve vacationed with in the North Channel several times….sure was great to catch up with them. We dingy’d to a couple of islands in the Intracoastal…..and walked around checking them out. It was then on to Daytona for three nights at Halifax Marina. On our way to Daytona we unfortunately landed our boat on a sand bar (actually a clay bar) in the Ponce Inlet during an outgoing tide…..not a good thing! The inlet changed during the last hurricane and Navionics was not updated. Long story short……we were fortunately able to get pulled off by TowBoatU.S., but it took him 45 minutes (under full power!) to get us off. We were very lucky that it didn’t damage anything…..we learned a lot that day! Daytona bike week was wrapping up while we were in Daytona, so we saw lots of fun motorcycles. We scootered to Daytona Beach, which was a happening spot due to spring breakers and bike week. We then headed to Marineland Marina for a night and were able to get together with good friends Jim and Jennifer Bladek who were camping in the area. It was then on to St. Augustine where we are staying at the Conch Resort Marina. See next post for more info. We continue to meet all sorts of amazing people along the way!

Serenity Island Anchorage

Sunset at Serenity Island

The village of Cocoa.....old Florida town

Cocoa Village Marina

SpaceX Falcon 9 take-off....very cool...light from the flames were much brighter than I would have ever thought

Falcon 9 heading to space

Falcon 9 booster rocket landing back on earth

View of Intracoastal from Titusville Municipal Marina

Bird with its catch!

Hanging on an Intracoastal island

Dingy'd to Pier 220 in Titusville for an early dinner

Another intracoastal island......

View of Titusville Municipal Marina and mooring balls from bridge

Sailboat landed on shore....we have seen many boats like this due to the hurricane

TowBoatUS pulling us off the clay bar......sort of a scary situation! We felt very lucky there was not damage to Moonshadow II.

Ponce Inlet with sand bar......we were stuck way to the right of the picture.

Our TowBoatUS savior...Captain Mike....he worked awefully hard to get us off!

Intracoastal view of Daytona waterway

Daytona Beach

Ate at Ocean Deck....right on the beach.....busy and crazy spot

More Daytona Beach

Halifax Harbor in Daytona

John wishing he had his motorcycle!!!!! Scooters were his best option!

Daytona Beach strip....loaded with bikers

Boat garages all along the intracoastal

Leaving our slip at Marineland Marina

Jim and Jennifer Bladek joined us for docktails and dinner!