St. Augustine

By Capt. Scott Buckley

We traveled from Daytona to St. Augustine in a day thru the ICW and arrived at the St. Augustine Municipal Marina and secured a mooring buoy in the southern field.  The cruising guide warn of shoaling on this route and to honor the buoys and not the charts.  The buoys are continuously adjusted for shoaling while the charts are not.  At some points along the route the chart plotter shows the boat on land when clearly we are not.

SV Simpatico also secured a mooring and SV Alice Mae went to her home port at Fish Island Marina.   St. Augustine is a pretty nice town.


The Southern Mooring Field at St. Augustine. You can't even see the Marina.

The St. Augustine Municipal Marina Building

 
The mooring set up is pretty nice here as well.  There is a water taxi into the dock, pump out boat, laundry showers and a nice lounge.  Did I mention they have WiFi.  The is an old fort there that shoots off a very loud cannon at all hours without warning a fellow.  I mean supposing your down in the hold trying to disconnect the power from something to get the boat ready for haulout and you are trying to be very careful and not short anything out and burn up the boat and while you are doing this and a very confined space BOOM.  The Captain soiled his drawers again. We would end up staying here for nearly two weeks and not leave until May 7th.

The St. Augustine Fort where they shoot that canon off to scar the sailor.

Dinghy Needs a Shave

The mooring field to the south is a considerable distance from the marina and dinghy dock.  Additionally there is a swift tidal current running thru the field.  This can make rowing very difficult and time consuming.  Because  we would need to go onshore a lot here in St. Augustine I had to figure out how to mount a motor to the wooden dinghy or inflate the blow up dinghy.  I first would try the wooden dinghy because we had already assembled it and had it in the water.  I did manage to get in on the wooden dinghy but I could not raise the motor up out of the water.  This would become significant later.

Just 2 weeks of growth.

It is amazing the amount of growth in just 2 weeks.  It also clogged up the intake on the outboard motor and made it run a little hot.

Changing Plans

St. Augustine was a bit of a turning point for us.  As I have been alluding to for a while we were discussing an ever change set of plans for our future. 
The original plans of that starry eyed couple from Texas was to sail from Texas to the Florida Keys and then the Bahamas for the winter and spring.  Then to return to the US and sail up the East Coast for the summer and hurricane season.  Perhaps to go as far as Maine.  We soon discovered thing were costing more than planned and some of the modifications to the boat were not working out as planned.  We had blown thru our maintenance budget in less than a year due to near by lightening strikes, a bad engine hour meter and all 3 house bank batteries gong bad while in the Bahamas.  Everything is so expensive in the Bahamas because it all has to be imported.
I won’t go too much into all the discussions that went into our decision as it may be a post all to itself.  It may help others in similar circumstances.  In St. Augustine we had a list of things to accomplish. 
1.  We had to find a place to pull the boat out of the water.
2. We had to buy a car.
3. We had to travel back to Texas and try to find jobs to make some money to pay for all of this.
Dave and Alice of SV Alice Mae again came to our rescue.  They took us around to the marinas in St. Augustine so I could get quotes to haul the boat and store her for 5 months.  Dave also loaned us a minivan so we could shop around for a used car.  Dave is a semi retired used car lot owner and it was pretty nice of him to loan us a car from his lot so we can look for a used car.  He quoted us a price on the car he loaned us and after 6 days of chasing down car deals I found I could not beat his offer and bought the used minivan from him.

In the mean time I had decided to haul the boat out in Green Cove Springs FL.  It was about 60 mile away by water and only 25 miles from St. Augustine by car.  We had to get ourselves ready to go back to Texas and the boat ready for storage.  We made lists and began checking things off.  I will make a post directly related to getting the boat ready as I am sure that will help people.  I did an internet search and found very little.  Most of what is written in related to hauling boats out up north where freezing is the issue.
We still had to get the boat to Green Cove Springs and that meant going thru Jacksonville and then up the St. John river.