Sunday, May 3 — This morning, Eric scoped out the Yacht Club’s amenities, which were very nice.
However, it was a fairly long walk from club house to the end of the dock, where Kosmos was berthed. No, that wasn’t a building in the distance, it was a cruise ship.
On his way back, he met the owners of a Nordhavn 57 that was on our dock. He went aboard their boat and talked to them for several hours. Christi joined them for an hour.
After returning, we were still feeling exhausted. For the last few weeks, Eric has been stressed about the boat work. The stress was probably compounded by not sleeping well in the motel. Now that the work was completed and he’d had a chance to confirm that everything seemed to be working properly, he felt like he needed to just relax and decompress. Christi was also feeling very off, probably a combo of jet lag, not sleeping well in the motel, and the broken sleep on the passage. We laid low onboard until mid-afternoon.
At about 1500, we decided we needed some exercise. While it looked like it may rain, there wasn’t any in the forecast. The temperature was on the warm side, but it was windy and the wind was chilly. The cool wind made it a nice day for a walk. There wasn’t all that much to do within walking distance, so we went with our default outing: food. We picked a restaurant called Rising Tide that was about 1/2 mile away and had good reviews. The stretch of road between the yacht club and restaurant was made up mostly of boat yards and low commercial buildings.
One of the boats in the yard was named Clan Keith. The name and logo, which meant “truth prevails,” piqued our interest.
At the end of the street was a large pond. There were tons of these Ibis birds all around the pond, vigorously feasting on whatever lives in the grass there.
The restaurant was along the pond.
So was this interesting building that was supposed to look like a sailboat. Per the internet, it was called Exploration Tower and used to be a tourist attraction. It featured an observation deck on the 7th floor overlooking Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, space-themed museum exhibits, gift shop and event space, but has been closed to the public for several years. It apparently closed for Covid and never reopened.
Cruise Ship Terminal 1 was not far beyond the restaurant, and one of the biggest cruise ships in the world was docked there.
The restaurant was fun. It had cool art, including a lot of neat sculptures made out of everyday items — we suspect someone got creative with their trash.
The food was fantastic, and they had some really great happy hour specials. The first photo is why we rarely let Keith touch the camera.
After dinner, we walked back to Kosmos and had a quiet night onboard.
As a side note, when we were several miles away from Port Canaveral, we noticed the exterior of the boat was covered with these flying bugs. The majority of them were actively mating. As soon as we shooed them off, they’d just land on another part of the boat and continue mating. They were mating onboard all day yesterday and today. We hope this doesn’t last much longer. Does anyone know what kind of bugs they are?
We keep forgetting to mention the mystery of the excessive data usage on our blog has been solved: there were lots of back up copies. Eric deleted most of the excess copies and was able to put us back on the lower data plan again.