It was about 4 hours and 33 miles from Titusville to New Smyrna, and it is like a whole new world. For the past 3 travel days we had been in the Indian River Lagoon, which has no tide. About halfway today, we followed a dredged cut/channel across Merrit Island as the island and lagoon were ending. This put us back into a situation where we have just a somewhat narrow barrier island between the mainland and the Atlantic Ocean. We are back into tides again, and the first picture today, which appears not to show much, is actually just one of many oyster reefs that we passed today at low tide. We saw LOTS of manatees virtually all along the way, and my personal "guesstimate" was 16, but sometimes we were not close enough to actually tell whether the swirl of tail or head was one or two manatees. There is only an estimate of the toal number of manatees in Florida, which is 5,000 for 2013. For most of the trip up the east coast from Stuart, we have had many manatee speed zones both within and outside of the IntraCoastal Waterway. Usually the speed zones within the waterway are short, e.g. under bridges and in canals or manmade cuts. However, we had one section today that was about 8 miles long where it was "Slow Speed-Minimal Wake" everywhere. It was a good thing too as there were manatee all along this portion. The bird watching was pretty good also. For example, we saw our first Roseate Spoonbills on this side of Florida.
The second picture is from the aft deck of Lucky Us at the New Smyrna City Marina and was taken at dusk. The small mangrove island and the dock to the left are lots of white Ibis and pelicans, including "lots" of baby pelicans. Its going to be noisy outside tonight, and for once it will not be loud music from a nearby bar...
We took the electric scooters about 1.5 miles to the local movie theater complex and saw "Smurfs 2". Not a lot of blood and violence, but otherwise, it was enjoyable. The BIG NEWS on the entertainment front is that tomorrow night we have tickets to a production of "Bye Bye Birdie" at the local theater company. One of those little known facts about me is that I love local theater and was a supporting member of up to three local theaters for many years before retirement. So, thanks once again to the Admiral we are going tomorrow night!
For about half of the trip to the movies, we rode along a waterfront residential street with nice, older homes, and to my surprise, there was a traffic circle -Whoop!
We also cruised along the "usual" restored old downtown, which unlike the last two appeared to be busy...
So far, New Smyrna seems like a very nice little town, but we still need to check out the beach on the ocean.
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