Florida Coast Part 2

Things go a little off course from time to time. Sometimes it's weather, sometimes it's just life. For reasons that will eventually be evident, we got a little thrown off our bearings early on in our Florida trip, and for a while it didn't seem right to be posting about our zany antics. But, we're back on track now and it seems like the right time to share some of what happened since the last post. We had left Cape Canaveral and continued south in the ICW, bound for Melbourne Beach, where what looked like a nice deep anchorage with good holding awaited us.

We got to Melbourne Beach in decent weather and found a spot behind the protection of the eastern shore, where a few bow-shaped scallops in the coastline provide a little north-south protection from fetch as well if you tuck in closely enough. Melbourne Beach was where we hoped we would have our first actual fair-weather beach days since the Chesapeake, and it didn't disappoint. There's a public fishing pier with a few spots to tie up dinghies and go ashore, so we decided to celebrate getting to warmer weather and spend a few days there. We had our first short and chilly beach day going ashore for a sundowner, and coming back to cook on board. Warmer weather was forecast that week.

As luck would have it, my aunt and uncle live nearby to Melbourne and caught wind that we would be in the area. The next day they met us at the pier and kindly drove us over the bridge to Melbourne City proper where we had a nice dinner and tried some beers at Hell 'n Blazes brewing. We extended the invite for my cousin to drop by the dock so we could pick him up on the dinghy and show him around the boat while we were in town.

The next day we went ashore to explore a bit more of Melbourne Beach town and discovered the amazing Melbourne Beach Market, a grocery store with a gigantic selection of Turkish, Greek and other Mediterranean food to go. With a picnic basket of tasty mezze and a cooler full of goodies we went to the beach, in actual bathing suits. We had a few beach days on the way south from Maine, but we had joked that we wouldn't be on vacation until we found a coconut. Well, mission accomplished. Finally, temperatures in the mid-70s, in early December. We began to understand why so many New Yorkers became snowbirds.

In the midst of our first "real" beach day, though, we got the news that would shock us out of vacation mode in the worst possible way. My mother called to tell us that my cousin, who we had just talked about bringing aboard for a daysail or an overnight with my aunt and uncle, had passed away during the previous night. I had long regretted having the excuse of being in the military to explain why I missed large swaths of family life, why I'd sometimes go a year without seeing a cousin or an uncle. So it hit me particularly hard that I was so close to seeing him, but would never get the chance again. It didn't seem right for us to be out having a beach day, and we went back to Shiloh.

The following days went by in a blur. My family arrived from all around. There was a remembrance at my aunt and uncle's house nearby, and we would meet them again at the Melbourne Marina restaurant to remember my cousin and try to make sense of it all. We were thankful that we had been close by enough to be there with my relatives, and that we got to reminisce with family members we hadn't expected to run into. We did our best to think of the good that came from this turn of events, that my cousin had brought us all together and reminded us that these adventures are fleeting, and something to be cherished in the moment.

We left Melbourne Beach for Vero Beach, with a picture of my cousin on the bulkhead with some of Shiloh's other visitors. He might not have made it on board, but he was definitely there.

- Shiloh Crew