Monday 16 Dec, West Palm FL day 1: First swim of the season and starting our exploration of the area.
We slept for 10 hours last night! A single night’s passage seems to get us about as tired as a multiple day passage. Very nice to wake up to warmth though. The duvet has been retired back to its cupboard and we are back to barely needing a sheet over us at night. But it’s also very humid. We’ll have to get used to being continuously sweaty again 🙂
If we are to stay here for a few days, while we go exploring, I need to check the anchor (actually, any excuse to jump in this delicious clear blue warm water). It’s the first swim of the season, and absolutely delightful. I just had to wait till the tide tuned though, otherwise I’d be whisked off out to sea, or disappear inland to the alligators!
Despite Cloudy turning back and forth in the tide, the anchor seems to have stayed in one spot. It’s a lovely sandy bottom and the anchor is completely buried. A quick inspection of the hull shows that we lost a few patches of antifoul where the chain had rubbed in St. Augustine with wind-over-tide, and also a patch on the front of the keel where we hit the bank yesterday. But the InterProtect looks intact. Ho-hum, well the nice new antifoul stayed intact for how long? 3 weeks? Plus under the stern there is already slimy growth. I often wonder if putting cheap interior house paint would be any different from this bloody $1,000 antifoul rubbish!
With the anchor looking good we make plans. A few Skype calls later we have an Enterprise car booked and soon we are heading ashore to West Palm Sailing Club dinghy dock. We politely check in, where we are equally politely informed we have to pay $18 per day to use the dock! Reluctantly we pay, because it looks like they have us by the balls. Meaning there is nowhere else to land a dinghy and leave it safely.
Enterprise offers a pickup service… that is, if you can get the local branch to answer their phone! 30mins of hanging on-hold we give up and get an Uber, only to find on arrival that our hire car won’t be ready for at least 1 hour. Hmmm, what happened to USA service attitude, it doesn’t stretch down the Florida peninsula? So we head off on foot towards West Palm Beach town center to kill time.
The streets and environment are clean and tidy but considering the vast number of condo tower blocks here, there are very few people around. It’s almost ghostly. After 30 mins walk in the humidity we arrive to the downtownarea and settle into Avocado Grill for a beer. A beer turns into a burger and burger into desert! The burgers were actually damned good.
Walking back to Enterprise we take the town route and note that more than half the outlet shops on the ground floor are empty, or closed. It really feels like a dead town. Well, I suppose it is a Monday afternoon. Maybe people are at work? I didn’t think people worked in Florida?
We finally get the hire car at 5pm. A nice hybrid Ford, a first for us to drive a hybrid car ourselves. We head across the bridge to Palm Beach peninsula. Immediately across the bridge we enter another world, starting with a wonderful avenue of tall palms all decorated with Christmas lights. And we realize this area is something special. We had previously thought the Hamptons on Long Island was up-market. But Palm Beach clearly trumps it (sorry, didn’t mean to say the “T” word). The houses and gardens are magnificent. And we are full of Oohs and Aahs and OMGs as we pass one after another.
What really stands out are the massive hedges around each and every house. All perfectly trimmed and many with arches into the driveways. We joke that there has to be Hedge Policemen around here, ensuring no resident has a leaf out of place! We vow to come back here on the bikes so we can better amble along the streets and admire these multi-million dollar properties. Apparently Jeffrey Epstein lives here. Or he did, before going behind bars! And we wonder what other high-class secrets hide behind these hedges?
At 6pm it’s pretty much dark so we head back to the sailing club and then to CB. It’s a chilly dinghy ride back, especially at “no wake” speed, plus we are dressed only for sunshine today!
The evening we relax and abuse someone’s WiFi which they kindly left “open” for us. Probably every yacht at anchor is also using it! However, it allows our PCs to go update everything that was pending without destroying our 4G phone credit.
Tomorrow we head to Miami … or at least south, by car, leaving Cloudy safely on her Florida style duck pond.