ICW to Daytona

Day 25 (Wed, Dec 7): Once again, the weather turned. I talked Patrick into doing the last two legs of our journey south back inside on the ICW. We headed out for Daytona today. Nice day but very windy. Would have been another extremely rough day out at sea. The ICW was much calmer. Just tedious. And, for the first time we met rude sail boaters. Gaia makes good speed when we are motoring. We were simply radioing ahead and letting some of the slower boats know when and where we would pass them. One guy, speed up, raced us, tried to put up his Genoa to keep ahead of us and probably red lined his engine. What a jerk. Then, we got to an anchorage (the weather once again started to get nasty at sunset) and boy were the residence of that anchorage foul souls. One tried to run us aground with his advice of where to find a good place to anchor away from his boat and another was just plain rude. We pulled up and headed out to our original plan at the Halifax Marina. It was blowing but Patrick did his most amazing job of maneuvering Gaia yet. He had to turn her in a very tight fairway in 18 knots of wind and rain. We made a second pass at the slip and Gaia was in. Wow, the locals on their boats even came out to cheer Patrick on (or like in auto racing, witness the destruction – which in our case, did not occur). He got major kisses for his performance. Simply incredible.