Tripometer – 16,084 mi
Gas Gauge – 1257.666 gal
Location – Long Point Park and Campground, Melbourne Beach, FL
Lodging – $35
Cans of OFF – 4
While still lying in bed this morning the camp office called to let us know that due to a cancellation they had secured one site for us for the remainder of our 12 days here. No more trailer moves after today – YAY! We executed a typical within-park campsite move, meaning we didn’t bother to put away the aft bunk and essentially just threw the outdoor gear in and on the truck to move the 300 feet to our new site stopping only to empty the waste tanks at the dump. We were done and sitting in our new site by noon.
We are now situated on a much wider beach that several trailers are camped in front of. There are at least three dogs along this section of beach and at one point in the day all three were playing fetch in the water. It looked like a proper dog park in the water. The campground has the typical ‘all pets must be on leash’ rule but that doesn’t seem to be strictly enforced at all. This is the sixth day of camping at the water’s edge and Ranger is showing the signs of true fatigue. By this evening he was wearing the face you can see in the picture above. On the up side, he’s sleeping really well these days.
The temperature rose into the 80s today and after Kelly completed her work for the day our minds turned to the weekend. We did quite a bit of searching on the internet for a local shop where we could rent a kayak for a few days. The fishing from shore has not been as fruitful as we had hoped (though we still have not ventured to the jetty where we’re told the really good fishing is) and we feel like a kayak might allow us to extend our fishing range a bit. We’re also just flat out jealous of all of the boats that seemingly everyone in the park has. We decided at the start of this trip that we were not going to bring any of our myriad of boats with us because we didn’t want to either pay the gas or deal with the hassle of carrying a boat across the country and back (been there, done that). Now that we’re camped directly on the water, we need a watercraft for at least a few days to explore the area.
We found a rental company a few days ago just up the street that wanted $75 per day which is ridiculous. In our searching today we found prices as low as $45 per day across the water on the mainland, but even that sounds a bit high. Kelly, in a stroke of genius, decided to find out what the cheapest kayak at a nearby sporting goods store would cost. After a half hour of google-fu she came up with a cut rate boat at Walmart for $170. Doing the math, we can have a kayak for the rest of our stay for less than the price of 4 days rental at the cheapest rental shop. SOLD!
We spent the remainder of the day securing a boat, paddle and life jacket before returning to camp feeling like we had cheated the system. The boat is no racer and has to be the ugliest color Paul can imagine for a kayak, but it floats and due to the fact that it’s made for entry level canoers, it’s stable enough that you could do gymnastics in the thing without tipping. Tomorrow is going to be a fun day!