We’ve reached St Augustine and are on the south eastern most mooring ball in the mooring field just to the south of St Augustine Municipal marina. You can see this on Google maps, satellite view. Enter the marina name and just look at the dots on the water south and a little east. It was from the water taxi for this mooring field that captain Bill Slattum, our training captain, took the picture I started this blog with.

It was nice and sunny (once the sun came up) but quite cool for Florida when we started from New Smyrna Beach at 7 this morning. 67 was the high today. DeFever friends the Satterfields from Bella Mare, also just up from the rendezvous, helped us away the dock. We really appreciated the work Greg did to set up our downstairs drive station. Cozy no mater what weather outside. By 10 we were upstairs with all the isinglass closed. No wind that way and a bit of a greenhouse effect so we were comfortable there.

Overall it was a great travel day with enjoyable and varied scenery all the way. Life along the Florida ICW is really nice. We see a lot of it from great homes and people camping, fishing and just playing in general on shore and on boats. Not only that, but the main depth sounder worked well all day! There were a few incidents, however.

I set off the horn by accident when the binocular strap caught the switch as I lifted them. Two days ago I gave a loud blast when the binoculars hit the switch as I set them down. One common use for the binoculars is checking out nearby boats. A bit embarrassing to give them a loud blast while I’m at it. That horn is so loud I have another one for giving toots in marinas where I don’t need the sound to carry for a mile. I’ve got to get out of the habit of setting the binoculars on the dash.

We ran aground and bounced out two or three times just south of St Augustine. For those boaters following this it was rounding green floating marker 81C. It’s a strange feeling when bouncing in a 45,000 pound boat. I now understand the phrase “shiver me’ timbers”. It wasn’t too bad since we noticed the depth getting less and had slowed down to a crawl in that area. I wondered how this had never gotten into the Active Captain hazard base. Nothing showed up on my iPad. Later I realized I had turned off display of hazards and a few other items to concentrate on scanning for any drawbridges I might encounter when planning the trip the night before. This hazard was marked and I had at least a good chance of avoiding it with the provided advice. Another thing for our starting out checklist.

The other was Sue’s heroic effort in getting that heavy rope and connection up from the mooring ball with the boat hook. This was actually the first time the two of us have done that, since there was a marina guy passing by who helped us a few days ago at Vero beach, and before that was months ago with our training captain Bill helping. We’ll have to practice that so Sue can drive the boat while I get the connection up.