It’s been a few days since my last post and we are now about 200knots south of Reynolds park – a 4.5 day trip by sailboat (doing roughly 6 kt/hour) or 3.5 hours driving. Needless to say, we don’t go fast!!! But we did have an amazing trip south! We’re now in the warm south (almost need to start the air conditioning) instead of the cooler north (Jane said they were running the heat today).
We started our journey leaving Reynolds Park early (before 9am) on Dec, 16. We caught a great flood current which pushed us off the pier and made our departure super easy. We were also fortunate to get a push from the outgoing current as we moved north to Jacksonville. At the end of our first day, we anchored about 3kt from the ICW.
We left early Friday morning (Dec, 17), intending to get fuel in St Augustine via the ICW but last minute we decided to go on the outside (on the Atlantic Ocean) and it was a good choice! The ocean was a bit rolly and the captain got a bit sick (only for a few hours) but it saved us time!! After we fueled up in St. Augustine, we travelled a bit further to our anchorage at Matanzas Inlet.
The rest of our trip south can basically be summed up as this – super early mornings (because we were going to bed early because we were tired), easy going along the ICW and then finding a place to anchor. Our worst anchoring experience was about 10 kts south of Ponce de Leon inlet. We decided to go past the anchorage near this inlet because we had time and we stopped just off the ICW, opposite a fish camp. Well, let me tell you, you don’t want to anchor near an active fish camp on a Saturday night!!! It was noisy and busy, even into the wee hours of the morning (and again at 5 am!!). We will never anchor here again!
After 4.5 days of travelling, including one great day of motor sailing (Sunday), we have arrived at Loggerhead Marina in Vero Beach. It’s a very nice marina, with a pool and everything!! Our friends Jane and Steve dropped our car off on the weekend, so we were able to go out shopping today! Now we just wait for Evelyn and Caroline to arrive on Dec. 23 and we’ll have a lovely Christmas celebration!
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 