St. Augustine and beyond

We parted company with Brilliant Star in St. Augustine where we stopped to pick up a mooring.  We were disappointed with the Little Red Train tour of St. Augustine.  We take these tours to orient ourselves to a new city as we did in Savannah but each time we wonder why we did.  The St. Augustine tour did a wonderful job of making St. Augustine seem like the world’s most tacky city.  St. Augustine has probably done a pretty good job of that itself but it wasn’t until we got off the tour that we understood why people love the city.  The narrow old streets in the old part of town, the architecture, and the art shops we loved.  The tour featured an overly enthusiastic guide who promised us the “absolute best tour in the world” and told us he wanted to make our day just a little bit better.  I’m thinking the CIA might want to use this guy now that they can’t use waterboarding.  His energetic narrative was accompanied by bad Christmas music including Alvin and the Chipmunks.  His voice with the music going at the same time would likely kill anyone with a hangover. 

An example of tacky.

One of the narrow St. Augustine streets

The next day we learned just how helpful it had been to follow Brilliant Star.  I headed directly out to the channel from our mooring.  If I had been paying attention I would have realized that the chart showed that I was moored in 3 feet of water.  Since our draft is 5 feet and we were not aground that is obviously impossible.  Our GPS was off and was showing us in 3 feet of water when we were actually inshore of the shallow area.  As I headed out to the channel the bow dipped and we stopped short as our keel hit the muddy bottom.  We came to a complete standstill.  Yuck.  I turned the rudder hard over and powered up trying to push us around through the mud and back to where we had come from.  Ever so slowly the boat started to turn, then we inched forward until we popped out of the mud.  Another boater helpfully pointed the way out.  Several miles beyond St. Augustine I let my attention wander and discovered that I was a little too far to the left side of the channel.  I turned the wheel over hard just in time to feel the boat bump hard into the mud at 7 knots.  Later I discovered that the cruising guide recommended favoring the opposite side of the channel. 

These are the channel markers we search for every day.
We have seen a hundred manatee speed zone signs.  We
saw a large shape in one of the canals that could have been
a manatee - but we don't know

Every night Maryanne studies the Waterway Guide, Skipper Bob, and the Intracoastal Waterway (Norfolk to Miami) as well as checking the Cruiser’s Net for ICW problems.  She knew about the problem with keeping to the right in this channel but I didn’t check with her about this at the right time.  The next day we coordinated the information about problem areas just before we arrived at them.  There are extremely long stretches of narrow channels with markers that are a half mile or more apart.  These narrow dredged channels can be in the middle or on the side of a 5 mile wide body of water or in a narrow canal.  It may look like there is plenty of water around you but between you and the shore a mile away the depth may be no more than one foot.  You are always searching for the next mark.  5 to 7 hours of this process can become tedious.

This guy followed us for long enough to pose for this photo.  We have many dolphin sightings every day and we
get excited every time we see them.

From St. Augustine we motored too many hours to Daytona Beach.  Feeling overtired  we decided that this would be a good time to take an extra day to relax.  For our New Years Eve adventure we unfolded our tandem bike and rode across one the the bascule drawbridges that had been raised for us the previous day.  Just as we got near the top a loud bell startled us as the gates came down in front of us.  We watched from a very different vantage point than our usual as the bridge went up and a sailboat was towed through.

With temperatures in the high 70's Daytona Beach was the first place where we felt like we were really in warm sunny Florida.

We couldn't believe that this was New Years Eve in Daytona Beach.
I think even the natives were surprised by the warm temperatures.