St. Augustine

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all. We hung out at Fernandina Beach through the holiday and took in their annual pajama party/post Thanksgiving celebration. The town is about 5 square blocks, packed with shops, bars and restaurants. 

Shortly thereafter we departed south for St. Augustine, the oldest European settlement in the United States, claimed by Ponce de Leon for Spain in the early 1500's. The fort, Castillo de San Marcos, still stands from the Spanish settlement and is a national monument now. The fort repelled several invasion attempts including a 30 day siege by the British. 

The sail south was spectacular with west 10-20 knot winds creating an offshore beam reach in slight seas. The entrance channel for St. Augustine is omitted from all charts as the shoals/sand banks shift constantly. It is recommended for settled weather only, which we had. Calling ahead to the local Sea Tow office indicated that all but one marker were in place and they did not think there would be any issues. 

St. Augustine is an extremely popular tourist town, with all the entrapments of shops, tourist venues - some real, like the fort, and some not like the Fountain of Youth, Rae Ann claimed she aged a year after drinking from it. We have a couple more days here before we move a bit further south. 








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cruising The Bahamas with Friends

Image
For the past week we have been traveling with our seemingly life long great friends on board, ok only 30 years but you get the picture. The Bahamas in winter are a bit tough when planning a week adventure, weather and tide are a huge factor as well as distances between useful ports for arriving or departing guests. Accidentally, or with great luck it seemed to all work out as we were able to meet in Nassau, get out 36 hours later make our way through the Exumas to Staniel Cay where our friends departed about 30 minutes before a strong cold front arrived that left us at anchor with 30 knots of wind and 12 hours of torrential rain. During the week - nothing but blue skies and relatively light winds. We were able to stop at Allens for a visit to the pre-historic iguanas, Highborne for some fuel and grocery, Warderick Wells for hiking, snorkeling and wildlife before arriving in Staniel for some swimming pigs, snorkeling and an afternoon at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club to celebrate Rae’s birt...
Read more

Sailing the Bahamas

Image
The Bahamas provide a great training ground for working on sailing skills, whether knocking off the rust, learning new skills or learning a new to us boat, well for us all of the above. The winds generally have an east component while the islands roughly run in a NW/SE direction so there is always a sailing angle. We have been sailing on the banks the past month, thus seas are 1-3 ft chop so very stable and easy conditions.  We have never used a spinnaker or asymmetrical spinnaker on any of our previous sail boats. Tenacious came with an asymmetrical spinnaker. We had brought this on deck in Annapolis to see if we had the bits and pieces required. We had a nice down wind run in the past week that gave us the perfect sub 10 knot winds to give the spinnaker a try. We were able to make 4-5 knots with an apparent wind of 6-8 knots. The sail was reasonable easy to handle with a sock to pull down/dose the sail. The sail is big and all 3 crew members were fully engaged to manage her....
Read more

All the Places We Have Been

Image
 Well it has been a while, apologies, we are in Georgetown now, arriving on March 7, 2023 to the Mecca of Bahamas cruising. Georgetown has a fabulous, large, well protected harbor and a substantial local support network built up around the cruising community, which first started coming here in the 1960's. We passed through in 2009 as well, very little has changed - a few more resorts but for the most part, same beach bars, cruiser volleyball and a lost of boats. Georgetown is also referred to as chicken harbor, because the sailing gets much more difficult/more open ocean exposer/fewer anchorages/longer distances, very few people leave until it is time to go back to the U.S. in April/May.  Let's roll back the clock three weeks though, we found ourselves in Oven Rock on Great Guana Cay, hiking into a fresh water cave - plenty of bats. Fishing was pretty poor.  A stop at Black Point Great Guana on our way north for some provisions and some hiking to some very nice ocean side...
Read more