Going Places Where Most People Don't

I admit it. I have been pretty sloppy about keeping up with this blog, the last couple of weeks. Not having internet access 24/7 really puts a cramp in my style.  We are currently in St Augustine, FL, and will be here through the 4th of July. We arrived Sunday afternoon after a couple of overnight sails coming up the coast. We had a calm weather window so we hustled up here, to meet our insurance requirements of being north of latitude 30 by July 15. The calm weather was nice for the ride, but we ended up motoring most of the way. I will back up on some later posts to fill you in on the highlights of the trip up here. We still have a few more miles north we need to go to be covered, but this town looks pretty cool, so we are going to check it out while we get a few repairs done.

The most important repairs include the mainsail and the dinghy motor. Unfortunately during one of our attempts to sail in light winds, with the boat rocking back and forth and the mainsail slapping accordingly, one of the seams popped and before we could get the sail down it tore the leech cloth. Nothing serious, but we couldn’t use the mainsail the rest of the trip.

During our road trip to TN in May, it apparently rained a lot in S. FL and we ended up with some water in the dinghy gas tanks. Our Yamaha 15 motor is sensitive and we had to get the carburetor cleaned. Since we like to anchor out and not tie up to a dock (mostly for financial reasons) being without a good running dinghy has been a nightmare.  Now we’re tied to a mooring ball here in St Augustine and well lets just say, the dogs will be a lot happier with transportation to shore. 🙂

We walked around town a little yesterday and Anna wasted no time trying to get Kylan signed up for school.

We have a lot more sightseeing to do, and the nice thing is how much more you get to see enjoy and appreciate when you have to walk everywhere.(my feet are sore)

The town seems to be very dog friendly which is nice. We don’t have to leave them on the boat all day every day.

Laundry day today and then we heard about some music on the beach thing so we’re going to check that out.

Manatees and dolphins are swimming all around where Stray CatZ is moored which is right off the shore from the Castillo de San Marcos and just north of the Bridge of Lions.

From Kylan;

“So, im in the Bahamas, after a long day of washing the boat, i took an outing to the beach. SO MANY CONCH SHELLS!!!! i was out swimming pulling random ones up, (super clear water) when i find one that looks like it has dirt in it, i look closer. and the dirt moves. turns out it was an octopus! and brought it to the beach for my parents, and got quite a few great looks at it”

I realize that the photo sucks, but this is the best shot I could get of the little octo.

That is his arm scurrying back into the conch shell.

A stiff east wind was still blowing this morning so we decided to do some sailing. I mean why not, we do have a sail boat. Plus it was great considering we motored all the way here. We sailed south from where we anchored and enjoyed a steady beam reach. Captain Mark gave us lots of instruction on sail trim and points of sail. More of a refresher really, but very much appreciated. I think I may have those Lazy Jacks figured out now. We ducked into Honeymoon Bay and on Gun Cay (pronounced “key”) and dropped anchor for some lunch and recreation. We all jumped in with our snorkel gear and watched the rays swimming around below us.

After lunch we motored over to Cat Cay. (again pronounced, key) Kylan navigated Stray Catz through the narrow tricky passage between the two islands like a champ. We stopped in at Cat Cay to enjoy some conch fritters. While there we saw a rather large iguana who when startled jumped off the dock into the water and swam off underwater with amazing speed and finesse. I had no idea iguanas were just as capable underwater as they are on land.

We then headed back to our anchor spot under jib alone. Due to the ocean currents, we sailed just as fast under one sail back as we did with two sails on the way down.

We finally finished off our day watching the sunset on another beautiful day.