Heading North on the AIWW to Ft. Pierce

rlehardt
Mar 8, 2023
2 min read

We are now heading NORTH on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (AIWW)…..just doesn’t seem possible. The AIWW extends more than 1,100 miles from Norfolk, VA to Key West, FL, so we will be on this for a couple of months. Heading north of the Keys we travelled through the busy Miami waterway on a Tuesday to avoid the crazy weekend boat traffic and I’m really glad we did. Florida boaters are not as considerate as Michigan boaters….LOL! We spent a couple of nights in Delray Beach (between Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach) and loved it there. Atlantic Avenue was loaded with great restaurants and shops and was very busy during the week. The town has a great vibe to it and it's an up and coming area. We then travelled through Palm Beach and Jupiter and found a wonderful anchorage at Peck Lake. We dingy’d to shore and landed at the Nathaniel P. Reed Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge. We found miles and miles of undeveloped beach with very few people. We swam and walked the beach…..it was beautiful. We then headed to Stuart for a couple of nights and hit it on an Art Fest Weekend! We walked the festival, listened to some rock-n-roll music on the waterfront and had a couple of great dinners. Many loopers stop at Stuart if they travel through the Okeechobee Waterway as this canal travels from Fort Myers to Stuart….but we went down to the Keys and around instead! We then headed to Fort Pierce for a week. Robin headed home for 4 nights because she was missing the cold weather…..NOT!.....she was missing home (kids, dogs, etc.) so needed a fix. John stayed in Florida and visited The Villages to see some friends and clients, went to the Stuart Trawler Boat Show, and got some work done. We continue to love the sunny warm Florida weather and have been truly blessed with good weather on this journey so far. Northeast Florida & St. Augustine (the oldest continuously inhabited city in the U.S.) here we come!