Even the Best-Laid Plans...

(Buffy speaks)

Sometimes work better than they're supposed to. We had been thinking that we wanted to spend at least a couple of days in Cocoa, and decided on Sunday night that we would head up there and hang out for the rest of the week. I'll try to get a rental car on Thursday so we can run some errands and I can drive myself back to Melbourne on Friday.

We left our anchorage on Monday morning and began what would be a (mostly) charmed day. The winds were strong, but not too strong, and in the perfect direction. We sailed, no motor, sometimes going as fast as 7-8 miles per hour. While we were on the way, a couple on a motorboat waved at us as they passed. It took us a couple of hours to get almost all the way there, and find an anchorage near the Cocoa Village dock. I was pretty excited to go ashore, since I hadn't really been off the boat in a couple of days and I enjoyed the chance to walk around town.

When we were ready to go back to the boat, we prepared for what would be an onerous process. Scott was going to kayak back to the boat, weigh anchor and bring the boat over to pick me up on the dock. As we were walking back to the dinghy dock, the couple that had waved at us earlier were coming up from their dinghy and introduced themselves. They have a dinghy that is almost real-boat-sized, and they offered to give us both (and the kayak) a ride back to the boat, saving us a lot of trouble and time.

They came back later and picked us up to hang out on their boat to watch the sunset. Our luck almost turned here, when Scott thought I was fully aboard the dinghy and pushed off from our boat. I came within a hair of falling into the water. We had a nice evening on their boat, which was very posh - like a floating condo. Then they dropped us back on our boat, and as they were pulling away, Scott yelled, realizing he had just left his cooler on their dinghy. They circled back and held the cooler for him to grab. He reached out, grabbed it, lost his footing and went overboard, cooler and all. And in even worse luck, I didn't have my camera handy.

Still it's been a pretty smooth trip for me so far. I've only touched one tablet of Dramamine, and even though we've had a lot of chop for the last day or so, I'm adjusting nicely.

(The pic that I think Scott plans to attach to this post is of me steering on our way up the ICW, trying to avoid crab pots.)