St. Augustine, oh so close

Well we’ve made it into Florida with only one little funny surprise (which I’ll tell you about shortly – it deserves it’s own paragraph😊). Traveling this part of the Intracoastal is much like driving on the highway behind a snowplough – you want to go faster but you don’t dare in case you get stuck in those “skinny” places (shallow for us Canadians). We did run aground a few times but easily managed to get unstuck.

After Thunderbolt (where Mark received some good advice about the engine and things are working much better now), we made our way to Brunswick, Georgia. We had an interesting tie up that night, staying on the fuel dock at Ocean Petroleum. Not the nicest scenary but great fuel prices. It was pretty sketchy but we survived. We did a bit of sailing to get into Brunswick, so that was nice. 

Just before we crossed into Florida (the ocean inlet at St. Mary’s), we met our little surprise. We’d been seeing these very large buildings for some time and had no idea what they were. As we got closer, it became clear that they were part of another naval base – a very special naval base that services submarines (an important side note here, we’d forgotten to turn our radio on that day – a first for us). I think you can probably figure out where this is going, especially if you’ve checked out the photos! As we passed the major dock and entrance channel into the facility, I said “Wouldn’t it be crazy to meet a submarine in here!” Well not 5 minutes later Mark is looking through the binoculars and says “Oh my god, there’s a submarine heading for us”. I thought, yeah right haha. Well there was and with a major escort. One of the escorts (a small naval boat with manned guns – very scary) came zooming towards us because we weren’t answering the radio hails  – oops! They were very nice but firm – stay out of the way and we were very happy to obey. It was an amazing experience to watch this vessel slowly make it’s way into port. I took photos slyly, just in case – big guns and all😳. I tell you, we giggled for awhile after that – dumb Canadians, no radio, big submarine!!

Okay so we made it to St. Augustine yesterday, July 26 and were planning on heading out today for Daytona Beach, but the god of the bascule bridges had other plans. We found out from our friends Sharon and Len (check previous blog) via email that the Knox Memorial bascule bridge just before Daytona Beach is stuck in the down position. That’s a problem. So here we are, spending another day in St. Augustine (which will be fun) and hoping the bridge gets fixed today. We can go on the outside but it’s 53 knots to the next inlet and it’s all motoring into the wind, waves and current. Not much fun. I’ll let you know what happens.