For nine years, if you kept a boat at your dock in Cache Cay and wanted a proper dinner without getting in the car, your closest reliable option was a straight run north to Sebastian. A chain link fence sat on Royal Palm Pointe, directly across the Indian River from Vero Beach City Marina, wrapped around a half-built tiki hut that never seemed to finish. Boaters idled past it for years on their way to somewhere else.
That fence came down. The tiki torches are lit now, the dock is full most weekend nights, and the math on where to point the bow for dinner has changed for anyone who lives on this side of the barrier island.
The Sebastian Run
Cache Cay was built for exactly this kind of decision. Most homes here carry deep water dockage straight onto the Intracoastal, the community sits close enough to "The Cut" for an afternoon of waterskiing or tubing, and the guard gate keeps the whole arrangement quiet. But the well-known boat-in dinner spots that show up in every regional boating guide, places like Squid Lips at Fins Marina, sit up in Sebastian. Local boat rental outfits on the Vero Beach side of the county put that run at roughly 30 minutes each way, which turns a casual weeknight dinner into a half-day outing before you've even ordered a drink.
Riverside Cafe, on the Indian River Lagoon in Vero Beach proper, has always been the exception. It offers free dockage and sits close enough to make a reasonable weeknight option. But it was also the only close-in choice for years, which meant Cache Cay boaters had two settings: the reliable regular or the long haul to Sebastian.
What Finally Opened on Royal Palm Pointe
Tradewinds 41 changes that binary. The project traces back nine years, to April 2016, when Vero Beach businessman Timothy Girard bought the building for $1.84 million. The site had a history locals still talk about: a restaurant simply called 41, then Ellie's, then Dockside, which ran until shortly before Girard's purchase. He named the new place in homage to that first one.
What opened last fall, after several false starts and a pandemic-length pause, is a two-story chickee hut with a working Argentine Asador grill at its center, a full dining room, and a dock built to hold boats up to five feet of draft at low tide. Girard's own site lists ten boat slips. The pre-opening report in Vero News described a dock built for twelve vessels. Either way, it is a real number of slips on a real dock, not a courtesy tie-up for one or two boats.
The kitchen has its own local pedigree. Executive chef Nick Schisler spent 2020 to 2022 as sous chef under Joe Faria at Quail Valley's fine dining room at The Pointe, a few minutes down the road, and brings more than two decades in kitchens that include a stint under the late Charlie Trotter in Chicago. The opening menu runs roughly 80 percent seafood, grilled oysters and octopus alongside finfish, with beef, some wagyu, fowl and pork filling out the rest.
A few things worth knowing before you cruise over:
- The restaurant seats up to 240, split between an indoor dining room, a covered outdoor patio, and an upstairs bar with water views.
- Girard originally targeted an August 2025 opening. Early diner reviews put the actual opening closer to mid-October, a couple of months behind his own timeline.
- There's no live music in the tiki bar. Early neighbor concerns about noise led Girard to keep the focus on food and the waterfront setting rather than a stage.
- A private golf cart shuttle is available for guests coming from the surrounding neighborhoods, on top of the boat slips.
The Actual Distance
Here's the part that matters if you're deciding where to go tonight. Royal Palm Pointe sits close enough to City Marina that boaters have long described the crossing as a short dinghy ride across the river rather than a cruise. Cache Cay itself sits a short distance from that same marina. String those two facts together and the run from a Cache Cay dock to the new slips at Tradewinds 41 is a crossing of the river, not a trip to another inlet.
| Boat-in stop | Location | Rough run from a Cache Cay dock |
|---|---|---|
| Squid Lips | Fins Marina, Sebastian | About 30 minutes each way |
| Riverside Cafe | Indian River Lagoon, Vero Beach | A short local run, free dockage |
| Tradewinds 41 | Royal Palm Pointe, across from City Marina | A crossing, not a cruise |
That's not a dramatic geographic discovery. It's the same river Cache Cay has always sat on. What changed is that the far bank of that short crossing now has somewhere worth tying up.
The Rest of the Week
Boating covers one evening. The rest of a Cache Cay week runs through a shorter list of names than most neighborhood guides let on. Village Beach Market and Vinz sit just off A1A for the nights nobody wants to deal with a dock at all. Riverside Park, reached over the Merrill P. Barber Bridge, holds a USTA-run tennis facility and its own boat launch for anyone who'd rather trailer than dock. The Vero Beach Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the region, sits inside that same park, and Riverside Theatre is close enough to fold into the same outing. An off-leash dog park rounds out the list for residents whose evening plans revolve around a leash rather than a line.
None of this is new information about Cache Cay's location. What's new is that one of the gaps in that list, a close, sit-down dinner spot reachable by water without committing half a day to it, just got filled in.
Reservations, Still
Diners who showed up in the opening weeks described a small parking lot for a 240-seat dining room and tight booth seating on busy nights, the kind of growing pains any new restaurant works through. Almost a year in, none of that has changed the pull of the place. The deck tables regulars already treat as the best seat in the house still go first on weekend nights. Calling ahead, whether you're arriving by car or by boat, remains the safer move.
The gate at Cache Cay hasn't moved. The dock across the river finally has something worth tying up to.
If you're weighing what a home on this stretch of the Intracoastal is worth, Kathleen Provancher and Team Provancher know this water as well as they know the market around it. Get Your Instant Home Valuation to see where your Cache Cay property stands today.
