We cruised back down the St. Johns River today.


We passed the large Jacksonville sea port again (which was busy today) and went up the ICW to Fernandina Beach, Fl, the last town in Florida before we go North into Georgia.


The ICW was very shallow in a few places even though it looked wide like this. This is mostly shallow salt marshes with the channel marked by red and green channel markers. There is supposed to be a minimum of 10 ft. of depth in the channel, but we touched bottom at 4.5 ft depth 3 or 4 times at a very slow idle speed in the middle of the channel. Once we even nosed up against a sand shoal in the middle of the channel that stopped the boat and I had to back off into the other side of the channel. Very scary, but no damage done.
Fernandina Beach is a very cute town with an historic district downtown filled with....guess what....art galleries, antique stores, fudge shops, restaurants and clothing stores. Surprise, surprise! The marina is right downtown so you can walk to everything in the nifty little downtown streets. You can actually see the radar arch of Nonchlance in this picture right at the end of Center Street in the middle of town between those palm trees (if you have really good eyesight or blow the picture up).

Wisteria is in bloom now, as are azaleas so there are flowers all over town.

There are huge liveoak trees at some of the large homes near town. Kathy also found a nice bakery nearby so I hope she'll go walking tomorrow morning and bring back pecan cinnamon rolls and the local newspaper for our breakfast.

We stopped at a very nice little restaurant and I had a lobster corndog ($12) for dinner. Kathy didn't want me to take a picture of it, but it looked like a regular corn dog except inside was a lobster tail. Kathey had a salmon salad and for desert we shared a "doughnuts and coffee bread pudding" which is bread pudding made out of Krispy Kreme Donuts and served with mocha ice cream. It was actually quite good and completely calorie-laden, I'm sure.