June 17, 2014:
So did you miss us?
We wanted to write last night, we really did, but it was a loooong day (like that word). I don’t want to get too wordy with this post, which if you know me is really tough, but I’ll try. In short, we had a good day (okay two days). The slightly longer version is we got up at 6:00AM, prepped the boat for travel and finally left Blowing Rocks!
It was a bit of a hair-raising departure as we still had the grounding scars with us, but we hugged the pilings as we left (it was of course low tide) and made it into the channel no problem. Finally – 300 yards of the 1,400 mile journey checked off. Then the chartplotter crapped out – which takes out the depth sounder and the radar as well. Okay, we were ready for that. Reboot and Amy made sure we had our route ready on the paper charts (see our Mapping Parties if you don’t know how that all came together). Right as rain! (damn, bad phrase. My fault. Future predicted).
So we ran north in the ICW for about an hour – it was sweltering hot outside, our trusty generator pumping out plenty of juice to run the helm air conditioners, keeping us cool and comfortable.
Until it quit.
An hour into the “big trip”. Of course.
Whatever, we ran on without cool air and sweated our butts off for eight hours – and had a blast. We saw more dolphins and manatees than we ever hoped for, and the constantly changing landscape kept us looking (as did the ever rebooting chartplotter). Day One ended with us running through a decent thunderstorm just as we were trying to pick our way though the shallows into Titusville, and a desperately needed slip. We did make a stop earlier, just to throw a little fuel into the tank – and discovered it cost $1,000 to fill the boat.
Ah yes – John and Amy, welcome back to boating! Friends, are you listening?
We had a fun evening dinghy cruise around the docks – a favorite pastime of ours – and then it was lights out.
Day Two saw us pulling out of the slip at 8:00AM (6:30 wake up), and a steady run north. Oh – and the genny is running again. It looks like one bit of discovery about the boat is that by design the fuel pickup for the generator is way higher than the pickup for the mains (propulsion engines), meaning that when our tank ran down to 119 gallons (it’s a 350 gallon tank), the genny starved for fuel and quit. Lesson learned.
Beyond that? Well, we had commercial traffic, bridge openings, sandbars. narrow channels and wide ones. all kinds of awesome wildlife, and at the end of the day we found ourselves in a mooring field in St Augustine, FL, surrounded by pirate vessels, megayachts, and ancient buildings.
So what I want to leave you with is a few pictures and a short montage video to cover the past two days. I’m writing this from Sequel’s cockpit at our mooring – it’s almost 10:30PM and all sorts of fish are jumping, a horse and buggy is plodding down the road beside the harbor, and some damn HUGE bug just landed on my head and Amy ran inside – so I guess that’s enough for tonight!
Some more photos form the first two days:
