Into the swamps!

We cruised up the St. Johns River today from Jacksonville, FL to "6 Mile Creek", which is about 47 miles up river from the Atlantic Ocean. We were joined by our cruising friends Bill and Jane Stone in their 53 ft. Krogan Express. Our boats are nicely matched for cruising speed, although we pretty much just lazed up the river since it's only 20 miles up to here from Jacksonville. That's far enough up river that it's all fresh water here, so the last few miles along this small creek, were lined with cyprus swamps, complete with lily pads and Spanish moss in the trees.

There's even a small alligator in the swamps right next to our boat. It's only about 3 ft. long and hard to see because it's almost covered with the water hyacinths and duckweed.

Bill and Jane got out their dinghy and tooled up the creek for a few miles. They said it's just like here at the restaurant except you're all alone in the creek and swamps. They mostly saw plenty of turtles. Jane pointed out that we're not too far from civilization though, there's a highway by the restaurant that you can take an in 10 minutes, you'll be in an outlet mall.

There is a very well known restaurant here called The Outback Crab Shack where we'll eat dinner tonight and they have the longest single dock around, over 1,000 ft. long running down the creek. The creek really isn't wide enough to put in other docks or slips, so they have just made it longer and longer. The restaurant is the little buildings on the right in the picture above with Nonchalance on the left with "loose Stones" the Stone's boat.

And of, course, there are big alligators at the restaurant.