Ice Age

2011 04 06
Still in Vero, still no traveller

It is freezing cold today.  The wind is blowing hard out of the north and the tide is running north to south.

A front passed through yesterday producing conditions today which we thought were good reasons not to try to motor north up the ICW.

Ahhh but the herd had other ideas.

Beginning on Sunday, with the cold front well forecast, the herd began amassing at our marina.   By Monday the flow was torrential.  Saturday night at sundown there were half a dozen mooring balls empty at Vero Beach.  By Monday noon every ball had two or three boats rafted up to it.  And still the boats came.

Friends on a moored boat found themselves disturbed late on Monday night when a strange  boat drove into their topsides in an ungainly and amateurish effort to raft up after dark.  The boat doing the damage had not called the marina and did not have a mooring ball assignment.  They just decided they wanted to tie up and they did not want to wait.  Desperation saw them refuse to anchor overnight.

Our friends had our full support for their uncivilized reception of these scions of stupidity.

Boats which had raced from the Bahamas to get to America before the front took succour here while winds howled and rains torrented.  For twenty hours unsettled conditions prevailed.

Around the marina clumps of boaters engaged in agitated talk about the weather and their plans.  A small voice in the crowd, exhibiting great couraged, expressed  that the front would pass on Tuesday and that they would with the first light heralding Wednesday's arrival.

By Tuesday the solo voice became a chorus of sailors all converted to a single line of thought.  Riding the bus found the talk dominated by everyone's fixed intention to depart on Wednesday at the earliest opportunity.

And so they did.  Like those long lines of plodosauruses in the movie Ice Age this morning saw the massed departure of all those independent minds.

Into the wind, into the cold and into the adverse tide.

If our traveler had arrived in good time yesterday we would not have motored out of here today.

We don't fit in.