Did he just say that? (Cover your ears)

It was a peaceful night on the mooring ball.  We departed Stuart around seven o'clock this morning. While underway we enjoyed our left over pizza for breakfast.  Things were very uneventful for about the first hour.  Ray was looking forward to going by American Custom Yachts.  We had work done there 11 years ago when we were first bringing the boat home.  Since then we have received their newsletter publication and are impressed by some of the work they do there.  Just about the time we got there a new looking, fairly large sport fish was being towed out of the sling by a small skiff.  I was prepared to give them a wide berth when Ray suggested that I stop.  After realizing that they were going to tow this boat against the current Ray admitted that we should have just kept traveling. Now it was too late.  They were about to get blown into red marker 46 which I thought I would mention because after looking up their web site, it says they are at mile marker 46.  I'll get back to that in a minute.  So guys on the bow of the sport fish are yelling things to us.  I assume they were trying to tell us they were being towed as Ray yelled "Yeah, I can see that."  After honestly waiting close to 15 minutes for them to get out of the way enough for me to feel comfortable with going around them at a less than idle speed, they start yelling obscenities to us.  Ray was yelling back some of the same.  I could not understand what the big deal was.  You know how slow we travel anyway and we were plenty clear of this boat.  The testosterone continued to fly with the presumed employee on the sport fish yelling "If you would get your dick out of your wife's ass..."  I couldn't believe how stupid this was becoming.  By then I was pissed and gave our boat as much throttle as I could.  I'm sure it didn't make a bit of difference with our lack of wake, but I just could not believe the things that were said over nothing.  I was seriously going to e-mail American Custom Yachts to let them know what kind of representation they have on the water.  When I saw that they don't know the difference between a mile marker and a day marker, I decided they were just idiots anyway.  By the way, they're at about mile marker 14.9.

An example of the large homes and boats continuing to be on the water even in the St. Lucie canal.

Finally got a good picture of a bald eagle.

This gator was about as far out of the water as it could get on
this rather tall rock just before the Port Mayaca Lock.

Thankfully the rest of the canal was pretty uneventful.  We had a slight delay at St. Lucie Lock as one of the doors malfunctioned, but we were up and out of there just before 9:00 a.m.  Nearly four hours later we were in Port Mayaca Lock for about a one foot lift. "Thanks Dad", a Mainship trawler overtook us about five miles previous and yesterday actually. We talked to them on the VHF and knew they were going to take the same southern rim route as we planned.  We heard them confirm this with someone telling them the lake was rough.  Well, we were not expecting all hell to break loose when we exited.  There was at least a three foot chop coming out of the lock.  I went below to secure things right away.  By the time I got back to the fly bridge, something else went crashing.  I let Ray investigate as I had no idea what that could have been.  Ray said the dinghy davit broke.  Did he just say that?  We had to really slow down while Ray got some lines tied to it to secure it as best as possible.  I kept driving and had no idea how bad it was.  Come to find out, it was the welds that broke.

See how cattywhompus the dinghy ended up.

We continued our way on the southern rim route as planned, just at a much slower pace.  The winds were still southeast so we expected to get some reprieve.  It took a while, but it did gradually get better and we increased our speed a little at a time.  We were originally planning to anchor about five miles past Pahokee but Ray thought we should stop at a marina to see what we could do to rectify our situation.  After reading the reviews on Active Captain, we were hesitant and again debated anchoring but then thought about what could happen if we got waked while trying to "fix" the dinghy situation. We opted to pull into the marina to see what it was like, then decide what to do.  We knew "Thanks Dad" had planned to stop at the Pahokee City Marina and they were on a long dock.  We called them on the VHF to inform them of our predicament and asked if they could help us get tied up behind them on our port side in the wind as the dinghy was hanging way off of the starboard stern making that side impossible.

The resident gulls and puffins.

There were really no issues with getting docked.  Some of the reviews were right about there being bird crap everywhere because there are no boats in here.  It seems when the winds blow out of the north it really gets rocking in here.  I can just imagine it after what it looked like today coming out of that lock.  The reviews also mentioned the shady characters and unsafe conditions in town after dark. Upon our arrival, Sue on "Thanks Dad" informed us that John, the Captain, was a former police officer so he called the police here to find out if it was safe.  The officer notified them that it was safe. The officer did come and visit them too while we were working on our mess.
We took the new davit system apart and off of the boat as much as we could.  Thankfully we still had our old davit system on both boats.  So we put the dinghy basically back up like we were doing it before we installed the new davit system last spring.  John was nice enough to help me hoist the engine up to the hand rail bracket.  That sure helped a lot.