Was great to see old friends again as well as meet some new folks! The food was again outstanding as usual, with thanks to DonV, Sandy, kmoose and Bumpdraft for providing the fresh fish!
Jim and I again had a great run up from N. Palm Beach, with much better weather than last year! Only burned 19.5 gal to run 85 miles, about the same as last year. We spent a relaxed evening Thursday night anchored out at the sand bar inside St. Lucie Inlet after a good dinner aboard and a late rising nearly full moon. Spent Friday night aboard at the dock with a nice NE breeze coming in the hatch, but wind had shifted to SE Saturday, so I joined Jim in the motel room Danny had reserved . . . sorry to hear about Danny's accident, but glad to hear he and boat were ok! (We did enjoy the room and slept well after the big dinner!) Ran all the way back home on Sunday, going offshore at Stuart to avoid all the idle zones between NPB and Stuart. (Ran ~ 30 miles from Stuart to Palm Beach Inlet in just a little over an hour, vs. 3.5 hours in the ICW on the way north, thanks to ~10 miles of idle zones!) The whole trip back took a little over 4 hours vs. ~ 7 hours on the way up!
I finally got around to downloading and editing some pics from buddy Harry's fancy camera - it's a 14 MP camera and I didn't realize I had it set on high resolution, so it took a bunch of editing to shrink 'em down to a manageable file size! Here's a
slideshow of some pics from the gathering, including a few I took enroute. There are titles on each slide, but depending on speed of your internet connection, you may have to hit pause or manually change slides if the titles don't show up! Enjoy! Denny