St. Augustine, FL

Friday was a perfect day.

High tide was around 8:00 am and we had to go under a bridge that was supposed to be less than 65 feet. Plus it was a full moon (or close to it anyway) and there was a lot of rain from the storms on Thursday. Needless to say, we were hesitant to go under the bridge. Why wouldn't we have just waited a few hours until mid tide? Because the McCormick Bridge in Jacksonville is only opening from 12 noon until 1:00 pm when the guys working on the bridge are at lunch and if we waited too long, we wouldn't make it

To avoid these bridges, we decided to leave the ICW and go on the outside. It made perfect sense; the weather was supposed to be good, the inlets to the Atlantic easy, the wind strong and out of the north / northwest, and we could skip the whole bridge thing altogether. So we left Fernandina Beach around 7:30 and had a great jib only run down to St. Augustine. For the good part of five hours we had between 15 and 20 knots of wind and averaged 7+ knots speed over ground. When the wind died to less than 10 knots, we motor sailed for a while and got to the dock around 4:30.

We are staying at Camachee Cove Marina at St. Augustine. It is probably the nicest marina we have stayed at so far in the sense that they have a really great boater's lounge, a nice laundry facility, very helpful and friendly staff, a casual restaurant, etc.

On Saturday we took a cab downtown and walked around St. Augustine. What a neat city. It has a different feel than many of the other places we have visited. There are old hotels, historic monuments, lots of different shops, an old fort, etc.

We stuck around for the boat parade of lights, which included 35 boats all decorated in lights and Christmas decorations. Some of the pictures actually came out this time!

On another note, Bill and I both hope that everyone in New England is doing OK after the ice storms and that power is restored ASAP. We are thinking of you.