St. Augustine, FL

 Approaching Great Sale Cay

Took just a water over shallow sand photo....will miss this!

We anchored and had an early supper - then took at nap at about 8:30 - we set alarms for 11:30PM (the first time we've set an alarm in 6months at least!) 

We did watch the sky at 11:44PM  for the scheduled SpaceX launch....we watched until almost midnight and didn't see anything...bummer.  It was cloudy down low on the horizon, but clear above so we thought we might have a good view.   Oh well, there will be more opportunities.

We raised the sails at anchor at midnight as planned.  Then Duane went to raise the anchor and the windlass (the electric thingy that pulls the heavy chain up) made and awful grinding noise and stopped working.  So he had to pull it up by hand - ugly thing to have to do with the sails flapping in 18 knot winds.  But he got it pulled up and we were on our way.  S/V Purrfect had left about 15 minutes before us.

 

Beautiful moon to sail by!

 

I mentioned that Cathy was giving us updates on the wind/waves often.  We expected fairly rough seas and gusty winds, so we put a reef in the main.  The winds were mostly behind us, so we were sailing wing-on-wing for hours on end.

 

Our new friends Chris and Allison on S/V Purrfect were sailing at the same time as us - they were making good time with their spinnaker.  We lost track of them in the middle of the first day.

 

Really nice sailing - the forecasts were for much worse conditions than we actually saw.  I prefer that to the other way around, for sure!!

 

I was a bit surprised that we didn't see much boat traffic - this is the only tanker that got close enough for a photo.  (And we usually see many cruise ships in this section of the ocean but obviously those are not sailing right now!)

 

Sunset at sea....

 

And night #2 was moonlit as well!

 

We took our Bahamas courtesy flag down....the winds have taken their toll.

 

Approaching St. Augustine after 39 hours sailing!  Weird to be back in civilization again.

 

Back to a familiar spot, the St. Augustine municipal moorings.

 

And back to traffic noise and sirens...

 

 Tourism seems in full gear here - this is a paddlewheel bar!

And this probably doesn't need any explaining!

 We got cleared in with US Customs and Border Patrol - easy peasy.  Then Duane set out to fix the windlass.  He knew the windlass was in bad shape, so he's been using it gently.  Luckily, last year Jim and Bentley from Salty Paws were in Oriental with their Manta and mentioned that they were going to sell their windlass parts that they removed with upgrading.  The part (painted blue) that we needed had been fairly recently purchased by them, so it's almost new.  Duane had just stored it on the boat as a spare. Nice to have the part without having to order anything!

And he got right to work - we've got a nicely working windlass again!

Glad I get to bring my mechanic with me!!!

 

 Weather will probably force us to stay here a few days....we're going to look at getting our Covid vaccine here.  Time for a bit of relaxing now.