St Augustine to New Smyrna Beach

How can you spend time in St Augustine and not throw in a couple of photos of Flagler College and other Spanish settler-influenced architecture in the downtown area? So here are some examples:

First, a couple of photos of Flagler College 

The architecture of another prominent building in the center of downtown, the Casa Monaco Hotel,  also displays a strong Spanish influence.

St Augustine comes alive at Christmas with millions of small white lights and lots of festivities. At the holidays it's jammed with tourists. But in early November, it was still mighty quiet which was a pleasant change for us! This is the main tourist street in town on a weekday morning - not a soul around.

On Avilas Street, the oldest street in the nation, many shop fronts were already decorated for Christmas, despite the fact the Thanksgiving was still a couple of weeks away.  It was sunny with temperatures in the 70s, but this place had bows and wreaths and sleds hanging from the balconies :-)

On another note, Jim had been thinking for some time of getting one or more tattoos. After talking to a few people in town about who had done the tattoos he admired the most, he decided to get a couple himself. He now has the symbol of the Tao on his inner wrist and a compass wreathed with "Not All Who Wander Are Lost" on his bicep. Pretty cool!

This year we took a slip rather than a mooring ball at the St Augustine Municipal Marina. The current is too wicked there to anchor safely. The first time we visited St Augustine we stayed a month on a mooring ball and the hull got scratched up badly from the barnacles on the ball. With tide shifts of 180 degrees every 6 hours, and sometimes wind blowing in one direction with a current running hard in another, the boat can end up hitting the mooring ball repeatedly. Not only is it hard to sleep at night with the ball banging the hull, but you can end up with some pretty nasty scratches in the paint because of the barnacles. So this time we opted to keep the boat at the dock.

Below is a photo of a gorgeous old motor launch at the fuel dock with the Bridge of Lions and beautiful clouds behind it.

Right across the dock from us was a tourist pirate ship. I wish I had photos of the crew, many whom looked for all the world like real pirates, even out of costume. No peglegs, but long scraggly hair, beards, some missing teeth and clothes that have seen better days. All engaged in high pirate drama when the passengers showed up. Quite a show.
One quiet morning I took this photo of an egret swinging on one of the pirate ship dock lines.

Last photos of St Augustine - this is a relatively new monument in the central park in town commemorating the work and sacrifices of those in St Augustine who fought to establish the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

We left St Augustine to motor south on the ICW in cooler, drizzly weather. I have a jacket with a hood which came in handy.  Jim had tucked away his wool hat and gloves and couldn't find them, so he borrowed my silly red hat... Sorta made him look like Willy Nelson.

In several spots on the ICW the dredgers are out in force trying to keep the waterway navigable after hurricane season.  This is a terrible photo of a dredger quite far away, but I put in in to show how huge they are - sometimes 80 feet long at least.

I've been tackling the varnish on days when we're stopped somewhere and the weather cooperates - not too cold, not too hot, dry for several hours at least, not too windy, and with no industrial plants nearby to blow particles of god knows what onto fresh, drying varnish. So far I've done a couple of coats on the rub rails, hand rails, and the companionway (below). It's a never-ending and pretty laborious process - taping everything off, sanding everything down, using a heat gun to completely remove the old varnish if it's damaged beyond repair - but it's weirdly satisfying to do this work. When the varnish goes on properly, it looks great!

By the time we got to New Smyrna Beach, the weather turned warm and sunny again with gorgeous sunsets and cloud formations.  When the weather is good, every meal takes place in the cockpit. Here's Jim at breakfast - this is a truly wonderful part of living on a boat!

In New Smyrna Beach there is a place called The Hub, where local artists display their work, and actually work in tiny studios on site. One guy makes "art" that is basically satirical - like this painting of a Starbucks called "Girl with A Pearl Earring with Latte Foam"... 

 ...or this one of Edward Hopper's city diner where the customers have all gone across the street to the Starbucks.

In contrast, other galleries in town were exhibiting award-winning art, including the quilted textile hangings of Bobbi Baugh whose collection titled " HOME is What You Remember" included the following:

We went to our favorite restaurant in New Smyrna Beach "The Riverpark Terrace" for a wonderful  Thanksgiving dinner in the garden...

 

Right after Thanksgiving New Smyrna Beach shifted gears for the holidays and Jim didn't miss a beat!

The Main Street was transformed into a holiday fair with music, gift stalls, dance performances by local kids and lots of people (and puppy!) watching.

Yesterday we walked to the beach and stopped for a couple of beers at Tony and Joes, which is right beside my favorite lifeguard station.  A bunch of really old guys who were really good musicians played outdoors on the patio while we watched waves rolling in for a few surfers. Lots of people drive onto the beach and get together for tailgate parties.

Tomorrow we will continue south, stopping at Titusville to spend a day at the Kennedy Space Center, which I've never visited. Wifi may be slower until we get to Vero Beach, so I'll shoot this post out today.

I wasn't going to do a blog this trip....

...but now that we've gotten past the rough patch that always seems to launch one of these adventures, I guess I'll give it a try.  Let me see if I can summarize the first couple of weeks.

We left Annapolis in late October in a rental vehicle I called "the beast" (a Dodge Grand Something) to rejoin Neverland where she had spent the summer at a marina in Brunswick GA. We will take Neverland home to Annapolis in the spring, hence a southern road trip with all our boat gear in a rental vehicle that we could drop off in Brunswick

One of the greatest joys of cruising is meeting up with old friends along the way and making new friends on the water. On the way south we spent a couple of days with Sunny, a friend we've known for many years. She has a beautiful home in Mount Pleasant outside Charleston and we stayed with her for a couple of days. Sunny had requested that I bring along my pasta maker. She has strong northern Italian roots and had learned to make pasta from scratch this summer in Italy.  We had a hilarious time making dinner one night - I wish I could load a video or two into Blogger but I've never been able to get the damn thing to work for videos. Help, please, if you know how!!! Anyway, between the homemade pasta (from flour and eggs to excellent linguini) and Sunny's wonderful homemade sauce we had a feast one evening.

We spent one day in Charleston - a gracious and beautiful old city that was, unfortunately, built on the backs of slaves.  A bittersweet city, to me. Here are some photos.

The second to last photo captures much of the spirit of the city - sun, steeples, wrought iron, the pineapple as a symbol of welcome. And the last is of Sunny and Jim under the arch of an old live oak.


The next part of the story is the rough part. It will be brief. We arrived at the boat on October 25 to find standing water in the boat under the stove, apparently from an opened galley port. There was fairly extensive water damage from that opened port to the teak and holly cabin sole, and a lot of other things wrong. We had had to have the diesel fuel tank replaced over the summer as it was leaking diesel into the bilge. This, and the fact that we had a concierge contract to have the boat visited frequently to make sure it was ok,  necessitated marina employees coming into the boat to do work and check its condition. Many things were not done that should have been done, or were done wrong, and we were charged for faulty work or no work. We decided to seek the advice of an attorney and today filed a claim with the local Magistrate Court. We may not get much compensation for our losses, but we think it's important to do this on principle. We'll keep you posted.    

One day, just to take a break from the issues with the boat and the marina, we drove to nearby St Simons Island, one of Georgia's beautiful barrier islands.  Here is Jim standing by an ancient live oak, some live oaks that have been badly weakened by recent hurricanes, and the island's lighthouse.

Not everything was unpleasant at Brunswick Landing Marina. As always, the cruising community was terrific and we had a good time with new neighbors we met on our dock. Everyone was very kind and offered any help we needed with our issues with Neverland.

One young couple just starting out on their first trip aboard their new catamaran threw a dock party to celebrate their adoption of a kitten. I think the breed is called a Bengal. Very unusual and beautiful leopard-like markings. They had a cake made to celebrate, and there was lots of good food and large quantities of alcohol involved. Another couple is sailing to the Bahamas with their 5 year old son, Miles, and their 7-year old daughter, Lilly, both of whom are in photos here.  Miles is the sweetest of little boys and Lilly is just a pistol. The kids are of course being home-schooled and one day Lilly came by with her dad to get ideas from Neverland to design and build a system to secure water and diesel fuel containers stored on deck (as you can see from the yellow containers in the photo of Neverland at the start of this blog).  Once it was built, Jim inspected it and awarded her an A+ for her school project.

We left Brunswick on November 1 and made our way down the Intracoastal Waterway towards St. Augustine. Here are a couple of photos taken along the waterway. The white cliffs are at the north end of another of the Georgia barrier islands, Cumberland Island, seen as we crossed an inlet in about 26 knots of wind.  Kinda bouncy.

On our way south we stopped for a couple of days in Fernandina Beach to visit with our friends Julia and Dennis who live there.  As in the past, we spent a really fun evening at the Green Turtle where there's aways amazing live music and a friendly crowd. Took videos that I can't add here but I post videos on Instagram, so if you want, go to "cspsail" in Instagram. We spent a day roaming around town - here are some photos of windows in the historic district (some with old, wavey glass in them) and my favorite house, which has carousel horses galloping around the porch.

The recent hurricanes have again wreaked havoc with ICW shoals and the shifting sand in inlets affected by strong currents. We have run aground a couple of times already, along with many fellow travelers on the waterway. The charts simply don't always reflect the true depths of water in the waterway and some of the markers have moved significantly or are simply missing. Crossing the St John River we got stuck on a sandbar at low tide and had to wait a couple of hours, tilted at an uncomfortable angle, for the tide to rise and allow us to motor our way off the shoal.

Now we are in St Augustine for a few days. We've been here many times before and always enjoy the  city and getting together with the many cruisers who pass through on their way north or south. There is a Cruisers Net on the radio every morning where cruisers share information about weather, who has arrived, who is leaving, what's happening around town, who needs help, etc. Here are four photos  - the pirate ship at the City Marina, the lights of town along part of the waterfront, the lights on the Bridge of Lions behind a few motor yachts at the City Marina docks, and today's sunrise. Yesterday a Dockmaster told us that some monster yachts many times larger than those in the photo will fuel up with 1,800 gallons (at $4-5 a gallon) and that amount of fuel only lasts them for 5 hours of cruising at top speed. Obscene.

That's it for now. More eventually, when I have wifi. If you want me to stop sending you emails every month or so as a notification of a new post, please just let me knowing I'll take you off the contact list. I know that lots of you don't have much free time and get googobs of emails - I won't take it personally!!  And if you can, let me know you're out there and what's new in your world - I really appreciate staying in touch with friends!