Day 188 - Roast Meat Hill — Captain Father John

Miles cruised 136, fuel purchased 286 gallons, fuel purchased $675, slip fee $112 , daily high temperature 77°f

We left the GPS turned on overnight as our anchor alarm. We were on our hook in Northwest Harbour on Great Sale Cay. It was a calm night with variable winds. The weight of our anchor chain would have kept us in place. As a result of the power draw from the GPS caused our CO detectors (aka low battery alarm ) to go off at 6:20 am. Perfect timing. We disconnected the bridle from the chain and hauled the anchor. We were underway in flat calm seas by 7:00 am. A nice way to start a long trip. We cruised for 5.5 hours and arrived at the St Lucie Inlet at 12:30 pm. It was another 9 miles up the St. Lucie River to get to Sunset Bay Marina in Stuart.

We arrived an Sunset Bay Marina around 1:30 pm and fueled up, pumped out and moved to our slip with five minutes to spare before a torrential downpour. We will stay in Stuart for 4 nights and then start heading north.

We cruised without incident. The Racors did not clog during out Gulf Stream crossing.

We are fortunate to have our friends Dan and Iris spending the winter in Stuart. Limo driver Dan drove all four of us us to the West Palm Beach airport so we could clear US customers and immigration. This is required within 24 hours of our return to the US. I went to the service window at customs and told the agent we wanted to clear back into the US. She said “did you call the phone number and get a number?” I explained I was unaware of any such number if in fact such a number did exist. She handed me a sheet of paper and said call this number, get a number and then tap on the bullet proof glass window when I had the number. I called the number and another customs agent answered. He took all of our information about our last port of departure in the Bahamas, boat info, details from our passports and current boat location. Then he gave me a 26 digit number. I tapped on the bullet proof glass, the agent returned, took the number, took our passports, made sure we looked like out pictures in our passports, returned our passports and said goodbye. We had been through a similar experience while returning from the North Channel of Canada to the US. There is a camera phone at the marina on Mackinac Island. We would pick up the phone, it dialed automatically and the customs agent would take our information. He then requested we each open our passports and hold them under our chin so he could compare the photos to our faces.

After our airport experience Dan drove us to his condo and we cocktailed with Dan and Iris for a while and then went to dinner at Spotos. Spotos has a great view of wide water on the St Lucie River and is only a 10 minute walk from our Marina. Great food and great service. Tonight we will dine at the Sailors Return restaurant which is at our Marina.

John and Jan from Mitzvah texted us and let us know they crossed to Riviera Beach from West End. We suggested they eat at Guanabanas. They will be traveling north at the same we are so we should see them again.

Bonus photo

Carl (Chef) Wooden – quote of the day.

“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.” – Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch – November 1, 1886 – May 30, 1951) was a 20th-century Austrian writer, considered one of the major Modernists.
Broch was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family’s factory, though he maintained his literary interests privately. He was predestined to work in his father’s textile factory in Teesdorf, therefore, he attended a technical college for textile manufacture and a spinning and weaving college.
In 1909 he converted to Roman Catholicism and married Franziska von Rothermann, the daughter of a knighted manufacturer. The following year, their son Hermann Friedrich Maria was born. Later, Broch began to see other women and the marriage ended in divorce in 1923.

He was acquainted with Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elias Canetti, Leo Perutz, Franz Blei and his devoted friend and inspiration, writer and former nude model Ea von Allesch and many others. In 1927 he sold the textile factory and decided to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna. He embarked on a full-time literary career only around the age of 40. At the age of 45, his first novel, The Sleepwalkers was published by Daniel Brody, Publisher of the Rhein Verlag in 1931/1932 in Munich.

Hermann Broch died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut. He is buried in Killingworth, Connecticut, in the cemetery on Roast Meat Hill Road. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.