West Palm Beaches 26:41.56N 80:02.37W
Lotus
Mon 31 May 2010 00:20
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We left the cosiness of the ICW and went back into
the open ocean to head up to West Palm Beaches where we'd arranged with Katie
(friend who lives in Grand Cayman) to come and experience life on board for a
long week end. We anchored up in the ICW which had a current running at 5
knots, this seriously tested our anchoring skills, but with three anchors down I
don't think we'd have moved in a hurricane. With our perfect planning (or
just good luck) we'd arrived during West Palm Beaches annual music and arts
festival 'Sunfest', which meant we had something exciting to do whilst Katie was
with us. West Palm Beach obviously thinks it is something special as there
are no dingy docks for the commoners who choose to anchor out, we experienced
the rudest people yet in the form of jumped up dockmasters at the private
marinas who refused to let us land our dingy there and objected to us
filling our water containers, implying that we had stolen the water tanks that
we were filling. I wished we'd thought of the retort at the time but
Katie's description of him as a 'jumped up boy scout in his long socks and
shorts, who'd obviously been turned down for the job of milk monitor whilst at
school', would really have put him in his place. I'm not sure that we
quite lived up to the superyacht image that Katie's friends back home were
envisaging as we landed the dingy on a scrap of beach and waded
ashore through deep mud (yuck!)
We had a great weekend eating out, drinking and
catching up with Katie. We went to the music festival but Americans do
have a strange musical liking, the offerings ranged from an out of tune wailing
meat loaf-esque group, a grandad with a banjo and dungarees singing country and
hip hop fusion rap which entailed a bloke telling us to put our hands in the air
time and time again. They redeemed themselves on the Sunday night with one
of the best firework displays we have seen, we had a grandstand view as the
display was set off from a floating barge around 300 yards away from where we
were anchored. We were sorry to see Katie leave after the week end but it
was time to set sail once again.
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