Welcome to Palm Beach Shores/Singer Island, Florida, USA

Sun just about to poke over the horizon on Monday, May 19

As we were doing our morning chores, Eric noticed that the water quality being produced by our water maker was not good. He was worried that something in the dirty water here had damaged the membrane, so he shut off the water maker. He also didn’t want to try using the DC water maker, for fear that the same thing would happen to the DC unit. The reality was that it wasn’t viable to stay in an anchorage long without being able to make water, so Eric immediately started trying to find a slip in a marina. 

Eric checked marina pricing and availability online. It looked like the best deal was at a marina named Havn. We felt like that was meant to be. He made an online reservation, then did some calculations. Due to the shallowness of the channels and the difficulty docking in the strong current, we needed to get there at high slack tide. We also needed to be cognizant that the bridge only opened at 15 after and 45 after. He determined that we needed to pull up anchor at 1230 to make the bridge opening at 1245 and then make it to the marina at high slack tide. 

Since we had some time to kill, we went to shore and had lunch at a burger place called Lindburgers. It was good and relatively quick.

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Exploring West Palm Beach, Florida, USA

Sunrise on Friday, May 16

The 2/3 moon was bright in the sky even after dawn.

As part of morning chores, Eric ran the water maker. As suspected, the water was dirty. We’re probably going to go through a lot of filters here. After we finished schoolwork and chores, we headed back to shore for lunch. We noticed that a Nordhavn 57 had anchored near us.

We went to a Mexican restaurant called Rivales, which was a short walk from the French bakery that we’d had breakfast at yesterday. The decor felt more like a modern art museum than a traditional Mexican restaurant. The food was good.

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Welcome to West Palm Beach, Florida, USA

Thursday, May 15, continued… We traveled south down the channel, taking in the scenery as the sun rose. The barrier island between us and the ocean was the infamous Palm Beach. Palm Beach was the first tourist destination in Florida, with three fancy hotels that catered to high end guests. As it blossomed into a city, it became known for wealthy and powerful inhabitants, including former President Kennedy and current President Trump. Initially, we passed mostly lower buildings that looked like houses, though we did eventually pass a cluster of larger buildings (though no hi-rises) that looked like they may be hotels.

The mainland side was West Palm Beach, which, in the early days, was purpose built by one of the hotel owners to be a blue-collar area where the hotel staffers lived. Nowadays, it’s also an expensive zip code. It had a lot of high rise towers with an assortment of other types of structures in between, as well as several marinas.

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Passage From Highbourne Cay, Exuma Islands, Bahamas to West Palm Beach, Florida, USA

The sunrise on Monday, May 12 was blocked by low atmospheric clouds.

And the rest of the sky turned an odd violet-ish color.

We’d decided to move around the corner, where it was more protected from the wind/wind chop (the blue dot on the map that we’d posted upon arrival at Highbourne Cay). We had to bring in the flopper stopper no matter what, as they weren’t meant for use in motion. Even though it was a short ride, we decided it was best to bring up the dinghy, too.

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Lunch at Xuma’s, Highbourne Cay, Exuma Islands, Bahamas

Continued… When Christi and Keith returned to the dinghy dock, they saw that Kosmopolitan wasn’t there. They walked out to the southwest edge of the marina to watch for Eric’s arrival. Looking north, we could see the marina, the little shallow bay next to it, and the sea wall that separates them. The marina was clearly a dredged portion of the little bay.

Looking south, we could see that the beach on between Xuma’s and this point was lined with chairs.

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