We're in Georgia after a very nice Atlantic Ocean cruising day!

We went outside into the Atlantic Ocean to come up from Amelia Island, FL to Saint Simons Island, GA. The wave forecast was for 2 to 4 ft. waves in the ocean and we had heard lots of reports that there was bad shoaling in the ICW between Amelia and St. Simons, so we just stayed out of the ICW altogether by going outside. When we got out past the inlet channel at Amelia Island, we discovered that the waves were actually about 1 ft. to 2 ft.! Very calm for the open ocean.

What's nice about it is you can just set auttopilot for your course and sit back without worrying about staying in the ICW channel, watching the depth gauge if the channel is shallow, and slowing down for passing boats or low wake zones. You just go! We mostly cruised about 5 miles out from land, so the shore was just visable on our port side all day.

Of course, when you look out the other side, Europe wasn't visable at all!

We only saw one or two other boats all day, which made the "out in the ocean" feeling even better. However, we did see a few other ocean inhabitants sharing the space with us:

We saw Northern Gannets for the first time on the trip. They're very common, but we just haven't seen them because they seem to stay offshore. They're fun to watch because they're absolute dive bombers! They fly about 100 ft. up and when they see a fish, they swoop straight down and fold their wings out behind them so they go into the water like an arrow.

There was also a single fishing boat out hauling nets. It was probably a shrimp boat with most of the crew sleeping because they net shrimp at night. We arrived at St. Simons Island early (about 1:00 PM) because we made good time by going outside. It was a nice easy day. We'll probably decide how long we'll stay here based on tides and waves. The wave reports are for 4 to 6 ft. waves in the ocean tomorrow but 2 to 4 ft. on Saturday and 2 ft. on Sunday. Because the ICW is badly shoaled in Georgia, we need to go either during high tides only, or go outside in the ocean. Tomorrow's tides would require us to leave before dawn to time tides right for the shallows, but we need light to go safely, so we'll probably stay here a day or two and go to Savannah outside on Saturday or Sunday.

We just did the tourist thing around Amelia Island today.

We visited the Kingsley Plantation which was started in the 18th century and was a slave plantation growing cotton and produce until the Civil War. It is actually a national park, run by the National Park Service, however it is poorly funded and the main house is in such bad shape due to termite damage and decades of neglect that it can not be entered safely. The attached kitchen house has been restored, but it was closed today. Obviously, the old cotton fields are now overgrown with scrub palms and hardwood forest, so there's nothing to see there either.

However, one of the more interesting features was the slave quarters, which surrounded the plantation house on one side in a semi-circle. They were built out of "tabby" which is an early form of concrete made from homemade lime cement and oyster shells. This was then plastered over to protect it from decomposing. The one restored house with a roof in the picture above was the slave manager's quarters which was more spacious than the slave quarters. The slave quarters were simple two room houses with a fireplace, a common room and a sleeping room. There were about 15 houses for the 50 to 60 slaves on the plantation. They weren't much, but they were huge compared to the even more meager slave quarters we have seen elsewhere. The plantation owner married one of his slaves and later gave her her freedom, after which she moved to the Dominican Republic with their children.

In a related story..... we read in the paper this morning from some local genius whom wrote to the Jacksonville newspaper Letters To The Editor that "April is Confederacy Month" and how the slave system actually helped the local populace. Then the editors used his letter as a headline "April is Confederacy Month". What a joke! Maybe I'm just a Yankee spirited Northerner, but it's a chapter in our history that should be understood with dismay and certainly not celebrated. Yet pride in the Confederacy continues in the South.


This afternoon, we visited Ft. Clinch on Amelia Island. It was a fort begun in the 18th century as an earthworks fortification protecting the channel inlet to the Amelia River. In the early 19th century is was improved to a brick and stone fort with very large cannons that could sink any ships in the inlet and channel. However, it was never fully completed, although it was operational and had over 30 cannons. It was a Union fort in the Civil War, even though it was in Florida.

While we were standing on the fort's gun emplacements, a US Navy submarine came through the channel to reach the sub base here. There are 6 Navy submarines based here and today just happened to be a day when one of them came in. I hope there are none when we go through there tomorrow in Nonchalance, because we'd have to wait while the submarine is in the area. There were two small Coast Guard boats with machine guns on them patrolling the area at the same time.

There is a substantial shrimp boat fleet here at Amelia Island. I love this picture....it ought'a go on a postcard. There is also an old-time seafood market tha sells very fresh shrimp and fish off the boats and also sells fresh fish caught by local rod and reel fisherman. They had sheepshead and a large triggerfish caught on the jetties locally. We didn't get any because we already ate dinner this afternoon and we're leaving early tomorrow morning.

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.

Problem Solved!
The replacement Sea Stairs were here at Lamb's Marina in Jacksonville and the marina installed the new brackets to fit the stairs to the boat. As usual, the brackets had been slightly "improved" since our Sea Stairs were made and they didn't quite fit the old brackets. My old cover won't quite fit the new stairs either. However, the new stairs themselves are as good as the old ones.

Jacksonville insurance adjuster says she thinks everything will be paid with no extra hassle and that I don't have to lug around the broken sea stairs until some insurance adjuster can see them. She said the pictures and police report were good enough. I'll believe it when I get the check!

We left the beautiful anchorage at this morning (pictured above) and went back to the Outback Crab Shack down river at 6 Mile Creek. It was much more busy because today is Saturday. The whole quarter mile long dock was full by mid-afternoon so we took the last 2 places on the far end of the dock. Getting in and out of the creek they're on is an adventure because there is only about 5 ft. of water in some places and we draw 4.5 ft. in Nonchalance. In addition, the 5 ft. areas are charted at 2 ft deep! Even though we found 5 ft., it's strange going over the spots marked 2 ft. on the charts.

Of course, we got a silly picture with the stuffed alligators at the Outback Crab Shack.....

We had a late lunch and I ordered their specialty, for which they're "almost world famous", the Boiled Platter. This is actually only the "1/2 boiled platter", which I couldn't begin to finish so we'll have lots of shrimp, crawfish, taters and sausage pieces to save for lunch tomorrow. The boiled platter is actually quite good. It tastes mostly like Zitrian's Seafood Boil, but is probably their own version. They also have a heart-stopping fried platter with an equal mountain of fried seafood and veggies. Kathy just got the fried softshell crabs.
Around sunset, we were still so stuffed that we just had drinks and crackers and cheese on the aft deck instead of dinner. We had to put the screens up because of BUGS at dusk. We played the board game Sequence, supplied by the Stones. It was fun and the girls won one game and the men won the other. The girls won the practice round too, but we wouldn't let them claim that they won the night.
This picture is actually from yesterday when we were on Murphy's Creek, one of the recent highlights of the trip. The picture was taken by the Stones as we were rouonding one of the many hairpin turns on the creek. Today we cruised by gthe Murphy's Creek cutoff and stayed on the big river.

At night when I took Daisy for her last walk before bed time, she looked over the side of the dock and thought that all of the floating weeds covering the water was just grass, so she jumped down to the "grass" only to find herself suddenly swimming! When she hit the water she made a big splash and a very large alligator that was resting or hiding in those same weeds just 15 ft. away made a huge thrashing in the water, probably just because we scared it, but thoughts of it eating Daisy immediately came to mind. I just reached down and grabbed Daisy's collar and I don't know else (I just grabbed DOG) and hauled her up onto the dock. She shook off and went on for her nightly walk, but after I dried her off back at the boat, she was cringing around for a while.

Tomorrow, we'll cruise back down to the Jacksonville area with the Loose Stones and stay at Lamb's Marina where I wil get my new sea stairs, buff up the paint scratches and on Tuesday we'll probably go to Amelia Island, which is supposed to be beautiful.

Beautiful cruising day! A flybridge day with temps in the high 70s.

We went farther up the Saint John's River today just to tour it. The morning was all like traveling on any big waterway...too wide to see much but nice anyway, however, the afternoon was very cool. The river narrowed down and was very pretty, shore to shore.
This is "Loose Stones", Bill and Jane Stone's boat, whom we were traveling with today. We were planing this morning when I thought I could see a bald eagle flying low at their bow watching for fish in the bow wave. It's a pretty picture, but unfortunately even when I blow up the picture, I can't tell for sure if it's an eagle.
Then this afternoon we cruised slow through scenic waters. Later went through Murphy's Creek as a side trip to our side trip up the St. John's. This is a picture of the chart for the Saint John's river, which is at the top of the page. Murphy's creek is the twisting, turning creek below the river and both ends of the "creek" open into the St. John's so you can go all the way through it back to the big river. If you stay to the outside of the bends, there's plenty of water depth for our boats.
Murphy's Creek was very beautiful and very green against the dark waters. It was also full of water lilys, turtles, alligators and lots of birds. This big guy was really big, or as Frank (Kathy's father) would say...."a bulligator".
Now we're anchored out behind some islands far away from the main river channel. We had the Stones over for dinner tonight and they brought salad and appetizers. It's a very nice spot and a good spot acroaa the river to land the dogs.

At the anchorage, we even had our own little alligator, about 2 1/2 feet long on the shore next to our boat.
Tomorrow, we'll go back down the Saint Johns towards Jacksonville again. I ordered new sea stairs to replace the damaged ones and today they arrived at the marina where we'll be on Monday, so problem solved. We'll wait to see how Jax insurance claims adjuster handles it. I talked to them today too.

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.

OOPS! Another problem to fix!

A Jacksonville Fire Department boat went through the "mimimum wake zone" here and created a huge wake which damaged our "sea stairs", which ars boarding steps that attach to the boat and roll back and forth on the dock with the waves or tide changes. The problem is that the wake was so big that it lifted our boat up above the docks and the sea stairs were pulled off the edge of the dock and then the up and down action of the next few big waves from that wake beat the stairs against the dock and completely destroyed them. The stairs are actually bent backwards and turned inside out.

I called the JFD and they came and also got a Fish and Game officer to fill out a wake damage report. A lieutenant from the JFD assured me that I could just buy a new sea stairs and the city of Jacksonville would cover that and the paint scrapes also done by the stairs. I ordered new seastairs today and I have the phone number of the city's insurance adjuster. I sure hope it works!

We cruised up to Jacksonville, FL today under beautiful blue skies, temps in the low 70s and calm water in the ICW.
Jacksonville is a very serious seaport with huge oceangoing freighters being unloaded by gantry cranes. The first one here was an ore carrier and the second two were both container ships.
The gantry unloads 2 containers at a time and drops them on waiting semi trucks. Each container becomes a full semi truck trailer.
Downtown Jacksonville is right on the waterfront. They have done an admirable job of regentrifying the downtown with the stadium, the central city square at City Hall and "The Landing" waterfront docks, an entertainment venue with a restaurant and store mall at the docks, a beautiful theater and lots of landscaping. They have The Lion King play at the theater tonight (we already saw it in Chicago though). We're staying at the free docks at The Landing, right behind the boat on the left in this picture. They're nice floating docks, but no power or water hookups, but we're self sufficient, so it's OK.



Some of you may recall when Chicago had the fiberglass cows placed all over the city, painted by local artists. Well, Jacksonville has the same thing with lions. They're everywhere. These two examples are typical. The artwork is sealed with some kind of clear acrylic coating, making it weatherproof. On the cheetah one, I don't know how many people noticed that the larger spots are all presidential profiles, like on the US quarter or Kennedy half dollar.

This is the downtown street right when you get off the boat, and the lower picture is taken from the same spot, just turned towards Nonchalance at the docks. There are about 20 restaurants within walking distance. We'll probably eat at the sushi restaurant tonight.

We've been enjoying exploring Saint Augustine, FL for the past 2 days.
Nonchalance is still docked at the municipal marina downtown. We didn't have to go out to anchor in the river because cancellations of other's marina reservations let space open up, which is nice because it has been cold and it rained yesterday. Saint Augustine is really a very nice tourist city without too much of the "gorpy" rows of tourist shops.

Walking the narrow brick paved streets you see lots of art galleries, restaurants, museums, neat archetecture and more.
This is one of the residential streets lined with over-arching liveoak trees draped with spanish moss.
Today, we visited Anastasia Island, one of the barrier islands for St. Augustine, and saw the Saint Augustine Lighthouse, which was built in the 19th century and has now been completely and lovingly restored and continues to operate as an official navigation signal, visable for 27 miles out to sea.
You can climb the 210 stairs to the top to see the fresnel lens of the light, which is almost artwork by itself. It has now been converted to electric power, but before 1910 it used to burn first whale oil and then molten lard, after whale oil became scarce.
The view from the top of the lighthouse is excellent.
Anastasia Island also has coquina stone quarries. Coquina stone is cut from these ancient shell deposits, shown in the side of the quarry, which have been cemented together over eons to become stone.

It can be cut into blocks like this and used for building buildings, just like other types of stone.
The lower picture is a blowup of the first one, showing the shells in the stone. The Saint Augustine fort "Castillo de San Marcos"was built entirely out of coquina stone and it was impervious to cannon fire because the stone absorbed the cannon shot instead of cracking and breaking.
Coquina was used extensively in and around St. Augustine to build buildings, including this oldest house in Florida, built out of coquina about 1720. It was originally a one story house but it was extended to 2 stories in the 1770s. It's now an historic landmark and open to the public for tours.