After a month away from the boat and a few weeks of visiting with people, David and I decided that we would spend the next week on anchor as we made our way north to St. Augustine. This we did, with very little photographic evidence :).
We had made plans to meet up with Bethy and Alex one more time again in St. Augustine. Funny how it takes us a week to get from Cocoa to St. Augustine on a boat, and our friends can hop between Cocoa, Orlando and St. Augustine via a quick drive! We spent a lovely evening on Friday and at a huge Portuguese dinner that was delicious. They headed home on Saturday after brunch and since we had just received our new internet antennas David decided the afternoon was a perfect time for a boat project! After our last debacle dealing with the antenna when we had to replace broken plastic brackets with new metal ones, I can tell you I was not looking forward to this project. Despite already having wires threaded from the old antennas, we struggled quite a bit and what should have been a 1 hour project turned into a 3 hour project and we both ended up with a bit of sunburn.
On Sunday we set off for another week of anchoring. Last year on our way north we had taken the outside route, skipping most of Georgia on the ICW to arrive at Charleston. This year, the weather has been particularly windy for this time of year and we would be unable to go outside. As we were heading north past Jekyll Island Marina, we heard someone hailing us on the radio. It turned out to be some of our Looper friends that we had last seen in Key West. We slowed down and had a quick chat as we were driving by. We had also reached out to our friends on St. Simons and it turned out they were in town due to some unfortunate structural issues with their deck. We made some slight changes to our plans and ended up staying in a marina and meeting up with them for dinner – a lovely unexpected surprise. They invited us over for dinner the next night. Since Endeavour-Highwind is too large to now fit on their dock, we decided to anchor at the mouth of the river on which their house sits, and we’d take the dingy to visit in the evening after work. It was a lovely evening dingy ride and I was struck by the oddity of the normal that is our life on the boat – driving a dingy up a peaceful river as our commute to visit with friends.
The dinghy ride on the way back, however, was significantly more precarious, as it was a nearly-moonless night, at low tide. Imagine a blind canyon run for several miles to get back to the boat.
For the rest of the week, we have enjoyed some further quiet anchorages and sunsets and plan for our last leg through Georgia, heading to Charleston for the weekend.