Bellatrix

St. Augustine, FL

26 October 2014

We left Isle of Hope Thursday, motored all day and made about 60 miles. We anchored in New Tea Kettle Creek. There were not as many no see um’s there but I did’t take any chances. I covered head to toe, sweatshirt, hood pulled tight, jeans, and socks, with bug spray on my face and hands, to pull the anchor.

We left Tea Kettle and motored out of Doboy Inlet to some ocean sailing. It was a pretty day on the ocean. It’s interesting that the ocean is shallow, we were 3 - 5 miles out and it never got deeper than 25 feet, lots of shoaling at the inlets. We actually had to go 3 miles east before we could travel south to get to deep water. The water is pretty clear and we saw thousands of brown jellyfish the size of softballs. There are many shrimp trawlers out.

We made St. Mary’s Inlet at Cumberland Sound late in the day, the Georgia/Florida border, San Fernandina Beach. FLORIDA AT LAST. We stopped for fuel and to allow Bella to relieve herself, she was most grateful. We anchored for the night in Bells River, happy to have made Florida. In the anchored we noticed a lot of boats and many obviously abandoned.

Some observations… In the lower Chesapeake and through Virginia and the Carolinas the Pelicans are brown, in Georgia they are gray with white heads and in Florida they are white. Do they not cross state lines. Maybe it’s just a change in weather but Florida seems much warmer and the sun is brighter, maybe the sun knows state lines?

We motored down the pretty Tolomato River most of the day, lovely homes. We crossed the St. John’s River, Jacksonville would have been a 19 mile detour, perhaps on the return trip. We continued on to St. Augustine, took a mooring ball near the Castillo De San Marcos National monument, an old Spanish fort constructed in the late 1600’s. It has 12 foot walls, and was capable of holding 1500 residents of the town, with water, nonperishable stores and a latrine flushed by the tides, made it impregnable. Repeated raids on the city had killed nearly a quarter of the residents.

We took the dinghy to shore last night. We had martini’s at an outside martini bar. We went to a pub, met some locals and the Goodyear Blimp pilot, and then went to “Tropical Bar” (many bikers), drank Jack Daniels, and listened to good live music and people watched. My head this morning tells me that like Ponce de Leon I didn’t find the fountain of youth either.