Time to depart Ft Pierce and head north to Titusville. It is an early morning for us and we leave the dock around 6:45am.

Here is advertising you don’t see on land 😉

We continue to see damaged boats on our voyages. It is sad to see and we ponder what led to its demise.

Around 7:30am we try to engage our autopilot but it is not working correctly. This is not a necessity but sure is nice to have under certain conditions. After poking around a bit we see our COG (course over ground) heading and GPS heading do not match. Argh!

This apparently is a known occurrence with Garmin Autopilot. Sometimes it just needs to be reconfigured. This was done when we went on our sea trial so we have been witness to the process. It requires several steps of various speeds and maneuvers. Unfortunately, we cannot do this on the ICW. When we do have a channel wide and deep enough then crab pots or boaters are in the way. We will be manually driving with no usage of autopilot for a while. And NO, this is not #3.  This is just an inconvenience, no dollars required. 😉 

Nauti Nerds is having a grand time kicking up quite a “wake”.

Yet another boat abandoned on the coastline. Kinda looks like the SS Minnow.

Monitoring channel 16 on VHF radio is part of our routine, all boaters should, to enable awareness and communication. The USCG broadcasts an area near Cape Canaveral as being off limits at a certain time window but neither of us thought any more of it. We had not been paying attention to daily news either. Surprise! We saw the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. This was on our bucket list! Sometimes timing works out favorably and you are at the right place at just the right time. Didn’t get a photo worthy of sharing since this was unplanned and a quick moving event.

Titusville arrival is timed in accordance with tidal shifts. After refueling we dock like pros and shut down engines at 4:30pm. We are tired after a long day but feeling positive about the day and progress made.