Bright and early Monday morning, April 11th, we pulled out of beautiful St. Augustine. You can see the city to the left and the fort to the right. This gives you a much better perspective of the size of the fort.
We caught another beautiful sunrise leaving St. Augustine.
The scenery really changed in northern Florida, but the size of the houses sure didn't. We can't believe how many huge houses line the ICW! You can see here how low the tide is, which makes navigating through the channels a bit challenging.
This was one of many really cool boats we passed along the way.
Our plan was to give "anchoring out" another shot, which we did in a small river along Cumberland Island, GA. This is the island where wild horses run free, which we quickly spotted upon entering the river from the ICW. Dave changed the anchor from a Danforth to a CQR (aka plow anchor) after having chatted with other boaters along the way. This anchor did set the first try and did hold extremely well, so we're thinking we're off to a good start. And then the 'ol take the dinghy to shore to let Darbi pee was even worse than last time when a couple of nice residents told us to be real careful where we walked because of all the SNAKES!! Of course I had to ask what kind, which prompted the response "big rattlers"! And then I had to ask if there were gators around, which prompted yet another undesired response of "yes, mam, lots of 'em". And so we've decided . . . we're "marina people!!" I almost forgot to mention the cabbage size jelly fish in the water all around the boat. Okay, maybe grapefruit size, but they were big! Needless to say, we got our fill of wildlife on Cumberland Island!
So we made it safely back to the boat, sat on the back deck, drank a beer, watched the sunset and reviewed the next day travel plans. We knew that there was a 30% chance of rain heading north through the St. Andrew Sound, which is known as the "worst waters along the east coast", so we decided to take a well charted alternate route. This was some good information we learned at the marina in St. Augustine the night before, which is just another good reason to be marina people. It's amazing the helpful hints you get from so many boaters who love to talk for hours to anyone who isn't their spouse!!
As predicted the rain came, but not until later in the morning. We had radioed ahead to a marina on the other side of the St. Andrew Sound to get a weather update as we started up the alternate route. The dock master told us the Sound wasn't that bad at that point and he believed crossing the Sound was a much better option than winding through the alternate route with a boat our size. He said the sound would be "a little sporty, but not unsafe" so we followed his advise and did a ubee and headed back to the ICW. It actually turned out to be a fun "sporty" ride across the Sound.
We had a couple of hours of light rain and we're thinking "let's go back to Florida to find the sun!" We had forgotten how depressing cloudy, rainy days can be. If you look closely, you can see a few of the flock of seagulls that followed us for hours, obviously thinking we were going to feed them. They are nasty little buggers, constantly squawking and dive bombing each other to get pole postion. (Dad . . . check out that bell !)
Later that afternoon, we made it to our planned destination of Kilkenny Creek Marina, which is in a town called Richmond Hill out in the middle of nowhere about 30 miles south of Savannah. Another interesting place with great, friendly people.
That night while we're reviewing the next day travel plans, Darbi just sits there and looks at us like . . . "when are we getting off this boat?" Actually she has been enjoying most of it, but hates it when Dave starts the engines. Do you think she looks like she's lost some weight??
So we got up bright and early Wednesday morning, watched the sunrise and got ready to head off to Beaufort, South Carolina. The ripple in the water was from a dolphin surfacing. They are so cool to watch.
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