Jan. 4

After yesterday’s short day I was resolved to get started early and get some mileage today. We got to Jay’s Harbor Light Marina at about 8:00 a.m. and found that a raccoon had stood up on the transom of the boat with muddy feet leaving it a mess but fortunately had not gotten into the boat. We washed the mud off and sponged the interior before loading up and pulling out of the little harbor and heading south along the shore of Merritt Island. The wind was calm until noon and the bridge in Cocoa disappeared in two hours.

Merritt island is a long narrow piece of land completely developed with high-end luxury homes many of which appeared to be built more to show off the owners wealth than to be comfortable to live in. I rowed the entire distance along this golden development and saw only one person outside of these homes. Perhaps their owners were still up north. The absence of activity of any kind on a beautiful day with temperatures around 80 underscores my feelings that such development represents a huge waste of resources. This conspicuous consumption has also resulted in the closure of all of this coastline to people like me who simply want to rest my bow on a shore for long enough to eat lunch and take a little rest. Not finding a place we could stop to eat lunch meant Heather fed me bites at the catch end of about every fifth stroke. I kept on rowing through lunch.

The one person we saw on the shore was a man who we noticed running out on a dock and who tried to call to us. I stopped and rowed in to get closer and we talked with him for 20 minutes or so. He turned out to be very interested in the boat we were rowing and said it was exactly what he was looking for. He also heard about TOTO’s toilets and Washlet in the conversation! Alas, a human being! We left him a card and hope to hear from him again as he promised to email us. He was in the process of renovating the older house on shore. Perhaps he will chose to use TOTO fixtures!

We made it to the Eau Gallie causeway in Melbourne shortly after noon and stopped in the shelter of its seawall where we headed across the Indian River to look for Pineapple park where our send off would take place tomorrow morning. There was no place to land there so we fought the choppy water caused by fairly strong headwinds through the bridge and found the inlet to Ballard Park’s boat ramp. As I rowed into the narrow inlet the water calmed and peace returned. Our "warm up" was complete. Tomorrow we officially were on our way to Key Largo!

I called Kim Gabriel of the Habitat affiliate in Melbourne who had agreed to come and drive me back to the car. She very kindly agreed that Ballard Park would be a better location for the launch. We were almost to the car when I discovered the keys were back in the dry bag by the boat. My embarrassment at having to drive back the 15 miles to get the keys was intense. What a start! Fortunately, Kim is a very understanding and forgiving person and the extra drive gave us more time for conversation about what Habitat was doing here. When we returned to Ballard Park we found Heather, talking to Joe Gassman, president of the Melbourne affiliate, and his wife, Judy. Kim had told them we had arrived and they came to find us. It made me feel better that Heather did not need to wait alone for my return. By the time I returned the second time they had all made plans to go to dinner together. This gave us a great chance to learn more about Habitat’s activity here and we were given a drive through tour of Habitat’s subdivision under construction.