We arrived from Daytona on Monday Dec. 6th after nearly being hit by a young motor boater en route who wasn’t looking where he was going as he was focused on his cell phone and was steering with his feet. Sarah flipped him the bird which got his attention and told him to pay more attention. Anyway, we anchored south of Ponce Inlet off of Chicken Island in Sheephead Cut, about 1 mile from New Smyrna, adjacent to a condo complex as space was tight. It turned out to be a great spot as there wasn’t much ICW traffic since Chicken Island is situated in the middle of the ICW thus splitting all traffic in half.
We didn’t know anything about New Smyrna other than our St. Augustine friends Jan and Tanya had said it was nice and we found it to be most pleasant. With the help of Google Earth, we found a Publix supermarket close to a spot where it looked like we could land the dinghy (Callalisa Creek) and set off to pick up a few groceries. En route to Publix, we were excited to spot a French bakery so we had to stop. Always room for an almond croissants and French bread but we found them both to be mediocre at best and a disappointment. However, the Bob Ross Painting Studio in the shopping mall with Publix was a rare find. The class in session happened to be on their coffee break and they saw us peeking in, encouraged us to enter. About 15 people had the exact same painting partially completed. Turned out they were learning how to be instructors of the Bob Ross painting technique and one we befriended was from Indiana. We then shopped for groceries at Publix, returned to the boat for lunch, and then dinghied to the town of New Smyrna which had a nice row of shops and restaurants on Canal Street, including an artist’s collaborative shop where we bought a trivet and met the artist. Further along, we found a 1950’s pharmacy/sandwich shop/cafeteria that looked authentic but which stopped serving food after 2:30 pm, City Market Bistro (nice looking restaurant, closed on Tuesdays), and an old fort of “uncertain" origin.
On Wednesday morning, we explored the mangroves by Callalisa Creek and could easily have gotten lost in the thick growth with many intersecting creeks, all of which look identical, but we managed to find our way back to Callalisa park, left the dinghy, and walked to New Smyrna Beach. It was high tide when we got to the beach, which was nice white sand. Ordinarily they permit cars to drive the beach, but being high tide, there wasn’t room for any cars. As we walked the beach, we saw several surfers in the water and discovered that the beach is well known to surfers. We could tell that in a few more weeks, the beach scene at New Smyrna Beach would be popular with the college kids as it had surf shops and eateries as well as a 1950’s shuffleboard club for the older crowd.
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