On the Water with As You Wish: March 16 New Smyrna Beach to Rockhouse Creek Anchorage to Palm Coast

March 16

Time for another Looperversary already!! Now at it for 11 months. It’s strange but ever since cutting across Florida and turning north once we hit Stuart it’s become more and more clear that the voyage is heading towards it’s conclusion. The tropical south Florida landscape has slowly been changing over to more pine trees, hardwoods and moss-covered live oaks. Still the deep south, just not the tropical south. We’ve lost those gorgeous gulf coast sunsets and being inshore from the Atlantic we’re not getting much in the way of picturesque sunrises.

Canal Street looking toward river

New Smyrna Beach downtown

New Smyrna was a nice town. Interesting history. It was established for the growing and exporting of indigo using primarily Minorcan, Greek and Mediterranean area indentured servants. Roughly 1500 were brought over in 1768. Purely an economic vs. religious or persecuted group settlement with financial backers in England. Unique for the time, slaves were very sparingly utilized in the settlement. Lasted about 9 years overall then over use of the soil and years of drought, famine, malaria pretty much killed it. The remaining indentured servants were finally granted leave and headed to St. Augustine. Then the usual Florida town story – fort built to protect the inlet (originally called Mosquito Inlet subsequently changed to Ponce DeLeon Inlet) citrus, railroad, seafood, tourists, etc. Nice downtown area – mostly just one street with shops, restaurants and a brewery (too heavy on the IPA’s for me). Some ruins of the old fort are still viewable in the city park.

Old Fort ruins at the city park.Big blue and white building in background is Masonic Temple

A nearby Porsche Club out on a road tour.

Gratuitous Porsche 914 picture for one of my favorite blog readers

Porsche 993 picture - just because it's the most beautiful Porsche EVER!!

After our stay there we decided to anchor out Sunday night with “InQuest” and “About Time” just a few miles up the Halifax River in Rockhouse Creek. Just past our anchorage the creek opens up to a long sandy stretch at the inlet which was “party central” on this nice warm sunny Sunday. Wall to wall boats along that shoreline.

Wall to wall boaters out at "party island"

We got a chance to drop the dingy and go exploring up some mangrove marshes and even dropped a kayak and did a little paddling. As the day wore down those boaters started leaving and we had things mostly to ourselves.

A little solitude and nature back in the mangroves

Russ and Jax on “InQuest” had invited us all over to celebrate the renaming of their boat now that they had officially mounted nameboards on the sides. A toast to Neptune and a tip of the bottle overboard to him still left plenty of beverages for us.

Russ and Jax christen "InQuest" as "As You Wish" and "About Time" look on

As the sun was getting low and we were all winding down we watched as a sailboat came into the anchorage and abruptly cut between “InQuest” and our boat. We all thought “Not good – shoal where he’s going” and about then he came to an abrupt stop. We watched him maneuver for a while trying to get free to no avail. Russ and Jamie fired up their dinghies and we headed over to see if we could pull him into deeper water. No luck with that at all. He was stuck until the tide came back up which would be hours away and in the dark. He was simply too close to “As You Wish” to take a chance on which way we would swing as the current changed direction as well as where he would eventually swing once he finally lifted. So, with the last bits of sunlight disappearing Martha and I raised anchor and moved further out into the channel giving him clearance for whatever transpired. It all worked out.

Dingy power simply insufficient to move that sailboat to deeper water

Sunsets at anchor overcome any of the days issues

Today we headed to Palm Coast and bypassed Daytona. Just had no real desire to go there. “InQuest” and “About Time” are spending the night there so we’ll get a report from them. We raised anchor at 9. Sailboat had left about 8:30 so plenty of maneuvering room. Uneventful trip. Plenty of derelict sailboats around the Daytona area sitting in shallow water or beached. Tried to figure out when the last bad storm passed through here because it seems like these should have all been removed by now.

Daytona putting in another new bridge to the beach.

Nice to see we can still build a bridge with pleasant aesthetics the days

Even their generic older bridge at least had these artistic renderings of dolphins and manatees

Some nice stretches of natural area

Then trash like this clogging the waterway - such a shame.

The only bridge we had to have lift for us today

A few dolphins surfaced ahead of us on occasion. Some areas of natural wilderness and swamps. And then a long stretch of narrow channel lined with houses. Palm Coast was being developed when we lived in Florida 20 years ago, so we were curious to see how it was doing. It’s grown a bunch. Unfortunately for us the commercial area is about 2 miles away and the local “European Square” with a few shops and restaurants is a ghost town on Mondays with everything closed. We’ll see if it’s any better tomorrow. The one thing I don’t understand here from a local boater’s perspective is there simply isn’t much water. There’s the river which is very narrow or else shallow in areas where it opens up. The Ponce De Leon inlet is 30 miles to the south and St. Augustine Inlet is 20 miles to the north. It just seems like there’s no place to go, yet every waterfront lot has a house, a dock and boat. Oh, and remember that sailboat from the anchorage – he’s docked directly behind us here in Palm Coast.