I guess it's been a little while……

But…..we are now in Florida and more importantly we are out of the COLD!

We have been moving quickly in an attempt to get out of the nasty weather and make it down to Melbourne in time for Thanksgiving.  The cold fronts kept moving across the country so making it on the outside wasn't in the cards for our time constraints and many of our friends were also forced to keep moving down the ICW just to get south.

Our nights in marinas include:

-St Johns Yacht Harbor during the one big storm and really enjoyed our stay.

-Our other night was at Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach.   They have a great pub and we got oysters on the half shell for $3.99/dozen!!

We did one night on a mooring in St Augustine since getting to the town docks requires a pass and besides the current there is crazy.

The rest of the nights were spent at anchor and the "Ace of Spades", our 55lb anchor did it's duty.  The one thing we learned is that in most of the anchorages in S Carolina and Georgia have two things in common,  high rates of currents from the tides and nice hard mud/sand.    There were times when we had over 2kts of current turning us 180 degrees every 6 hours!  You better have a good anchor set in those conditions.

 Our anchorages included:

• Bull Creek, NC
• S. Santee, SC
• Whiteside Creek, SC
• Stono River, SC
• S Edisto River, SC
• Beaufort, SC
• Bull Creek, SC
• Birthday Creek, GA
• North River, GA
• Brickhill River, GA
• Daytona Beach (memorial bridge anchorage)
• Tittusville (the RR bridge anchorage)

OK, some pictures….

St Johns Plantation Yacht Harbor

8 foot tides

low tide!

Beaufort, SC waterfront

more of the waterfront

Beautiful homes

low bridge…I mean tree!

 Southern flare

Parts of the trip south were rather interesting……our run through Hell Cut was at low tide and I mean low tide!  If you look closely you can see a slight adjustment to our course as we ended up backing up a few feet, turning to starboard and continuing.  The starboard hull (where the depth meter is) said 4.5' but the starboard hull must have been more like 3.5 feet since that part of Nati did not want to go forward.  We made it though but the two unimarans behind us decided to view the pretty scenery until the tide came up. (they were on the bottom and needed more water to float)

Then there was St Andrews Sound.  Notoriously difficult at times to get around since you have to go out almost to the coast to get around the sandbars and then back in.  Well, we made it this time along with two other boats but most stayed (perhaps smartly) at Jekyll Island for the night.

kind of rough

one of our buddies

And fear not……we are back in the land of the "weird".

for you that need some creativity

and the sheet says "tie up here for free"

 Florida would not be complete with out a good sunset.  This one is Daytona Beach style.

is it a bird or plane?

Right now we are going to hang out in Melbourne for a couple of weeks.  There is family "stuff" to take care of so not much in the realm of sailing.  We will clean Nati up some, take care of provisioning and maybe even see some snow.  UGH.