Florida mixed with rare treats and troubles

The state of Florida is beautiful, especially the coast. That's why so many people live here. That's also why they have so many restrictions on the waterway. There are no wake zones within no wake zones. There are private communities that create their own waterways off of the ICW, which are perfect places to anchor, but transients aren't allowed to anchor there, and the ICW needs dredging in numerous places. Today we often encountered five feet of water under our boat, which draws about three feet and ten inches.

Despite these obstacles though, we traveled 95 miles today, the farthest we've traveled yet in one day. We passed Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral, but could't catch a glimpse of the speedway and only saw the NASA assembly building from a far off distance. Our departure point today was a small creek called Factory Creek that we got lucky finding right beside a Sea Ray factory in between St. Augustine and Palm Coast. Tomorrow we should reach Palm Shores and the next day we should come to Palm Beach. A few days back we passed Isle of Palms. Getting these towns mixed up has been common for us.

While anchored in Factory Creek we had no Internet signal from our phone's hotspots, which was strange because it was in the middle of  suburban area. We left that anchorage at sunrise and cruised down the waterway to about five or ten miles south of Cocoa, which is historically the birthplace of surfing in the U.S. That kind of follows a trend because we also passed the birthplaces of auto racing in Daytona Beach, and of the U.S. space program in Cape Canaveral, and yesterday we passed the first city established in the U.S. when passing St. Augustine.

It was tough finding an anchorage tonight because our route ended on the Indian River, which is long and wide and has just about no tributaries or creeks running off it. We're now anchored on the east side of the mile-wide river, about 200 yards from the shore, where peacocks have been screaming all evening. It's not annoying though. We've encountered plenty of terns, pelicans and cormorants, and even a few ospreys, egrets, and blue herons, but this is the first encounter we've had with peacocks on the trip.