It’s great to be back along side the Reynolds Park pier, safely tied with multiple lines. Our stay at St. Augustine wasn’t exactly what we had planned for! Our thought was that we’d have a nice quiet visit and enjoy some of the sights and sounds of St. Augustine at Easter. Well we ended up spending Friday recovering from our sail across and we had a nice lunch out!
Saturday was spent trying to get a phone plan for my phone. It was very frustrating and we left the Verizon office without a plan. We did a bit of grocery shopping and then headed back to the boat. The Sunday and Monday weather predictions were looking pretty rough – rain and wind! The prediction was dead on – the winds started Sunday morning and so did the rain. We were tied to a mooring ball in the north field and unfortunately we faced directly into the inlet when the wind started blowing from the north and northeast. We had sustained winds in the high 20knots with gusts up to 35knots. We bounced and rocked with the waves coming in from the ocean and at times, the strong current turned us sideways to the wind (that’s not much fun).
As night rolled around, Mark thought we should check our 2 mooring lines (just to be safe). It was a good thing he checked – one line was broken and the other was chafed!! It was kind of scary to think about it. We were hanging onto the ball with a damaged dock line and there were at least 5 boats behind us. Mark used our snubber line (this line gets attached to the chain of the anchor to stop the chain from rubbing when you’re on the hook) and 2 other dock lines to secure us for the night and we checked the lines every 3 hours!! It was a long night but all lines were still attached on Monday morning.
The weather continued to be windy and rainy on Monday. We delayed our early Monday departure from St. Augustine until the wind died down a bit. We managed to drop the mooring ball around 11 am. It was a very interesting 40nm trip north – visibility at times was terrible but at least we didn’t have to content with lots of boat traffic. We were mostly by ourselves!!
Tuesday we made our way along the St. Johns River, through Jacksonville and down to Reynolds Park by 4pm. We had one bad squall roll through just as we were approaching the Main Street Lift bridge in Jacksonville so we had to coast for several minutes while it blew by. When we arrived at Reynolds, we were super lucky to have help from 2 fellow cruisers on the pier. They took our lines and helped us get secured! We now have 3 weeks to get the boat ready for haulout and storage. We booked our haulout for May 2 so that gives us lots of time to get all the work done.
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 