To Dragon Point

I didn't get an early start today because Jim insisted on buying me breakfast in town. Breakfast was great and I cast off my lines and headed north at 9:30. The wind was light so today was a motoring day.


You can see in the first photo what the ICW looks like; it's like motoring on a river at times and then it can open up into a large lake. It is very shallow in most spots. The big lakes I crossed today were 3 to 6 ft deep with the ICW varying from 15 ft to 5.x ft deep although I did not touch bottom today. You have to stay in the channel when you have a sail boat or you will definitely hit bottom. The channel is marked on my GPS chart plotter and there are signs like in the second and third photos. Green squares are to the starboard going north and red triangles are port. They are spaced so you can usually see the next one when you pass one. On a rainy day or in the dark it would be impossible to see all of them because only a few have lights.



I got to the anchorage at Dragon Point at 3:30 this afternoon. Dragon Point is at the mouth of the Banana River which flows into the Indian River. Someone made a large dragon out of rocks at the very tip of the point and covered it with carpeting to make it look real. It collapsed a few years ago and you can see in the last photo what is left.




There are so many dolphins here you can't count them all. They come so close to the boat you can hear them breath. Sometimes they will come all the way out of the water next to you and scare the heck out of you. What a beautiful spot, there are about 8 boats anchored with me and more coming in every hour.