Daytona to Vero Beach and a side-trip to paradise

I Dock in the Daytona municipal marina was a fortunate location as we met such a great group of boaters, in particular our near-neighbours,  Jim and Fran, and Dan and Debbie. We enjoyed drinks on our boat and dinner at a very nice Thai restaurant in their company. They were also generous with trips to stores (including the World Market where Terry was able to replenish his Vegemite supply) and advice about sailing in Florida and the Bahamas. Wes, another I-Docker, helped us with some work on the boat  and some good ideas for our planned visit to Key West.

Christmas was very low key. We called the Hogan family Christmas party on Skype at about 2 in the morning, and it was great to chat to everyone, though in some ways they seemed further away than ever. Later we biked through town in search of somewhere to eat lunch and found a bar open where we celebrated with a bucket of crawfish and a couple of cold beers. The beach seemed to be the place to be on Christmas day, with thousands of people picnicking, swimming and of course driving on the rock hard white sand.

With our oil changed and various other jobs done, we made the most of the good conditions to cover nearly fifty miles to Titusville, where we anchored out amongst a variety of vessels - including some that seemed to be abandoned - near the municipal marina. The next day was similar, as we made our way through the chain of tiny green islands that line this part of the Waterway, and anchored in the lee of one of them for the night.

Venison burgers on the grill, another spectacular sunset and the gentle rocking of the boat in the perfect silence of the night - broken only by the sound of handgun fire from two guys camping on the island. We never did find out if they both survived the night. From Titusville we had a short passage to a slip in a private marina south of Vero Beach, where we would leave Common Sense for a few days while we headed to Sarasota to spend a few days with our friend Jane from our original marina at Kent Narrows.

The drive from Vero Beach to Sarasota took us right across Florida, and much of it could have been the south west of Western Australia, only substituting palms for gum trees. Flattish green pastures, cattle, citrus orchards - we could easily have been in Harvey!

Whenever we asked Jane about her home in Sarasota, her answer was always simply, "It's paradise!" and as we approached the coast it started to look as though she was speaking the truth. The Sarasota story will be the subject of the next blog - appearing soon!

A happy new year to all our lovely friends, whom we miss every day.

Daytona Days

Hi everyone - here we are in a marina at Daytona Beach for a few days.

Daytona markets itself at 'the most famous beach in the world' - I don't know if that's true. There are other contenders, surely - Waikiki, Malibu, Venice Beach, the Riviera - even Bondi, perhaps. The Beach was actually the original Daytona racetrack. Its white sand is packed hard for a long straight stretch, a perfect site for high speed and spectacle. Now there's a huge racing complex of course, the setting for the Daytona 500 and other big international events. Cars are permitted on the beach, and there's a line-up of them all along the beachfront, some with sunbathers on the roof! We went for a bike ride along the beach - plenty of people 'swimming' though this looked like a bit of a challenge in the very shallow water.

Like a lot of other places, Daytona is showing the effects of prolonged economic downturn with lots of closed-down shops and businesses. The only places that really seem to be thriving are those familiar scavengers of misfortune - pawn shops, jail bonds and low end law firms. It's a sad thing, because the really distinctive quality of the American people is their spirit of enterprise and their optimism. People want to work and to build a future, but so much is stacked against them at the moment.

We did our usual orientation by going to the local museum/ art gallery, a really interesting collection which includes a terrific Cuban gallery of pictures and artefacts rescued and stored by Battista as the revolution began. There was also a wonderful exhibition of nature photography and another of the early artefacts of Coca Cola production, as Daytona was home to the original Roots bottling company.

We're on the live-aboard dock where the boats have been beautifully decorated and lit up for Christmas, and we've met some very friendly and generous fellow boaters to celebrate with. We did the Skype call home to talk to the kids and family at the traditional Hogan family lunch - wonderful to see everyone, but at the same time it does make us aware of just how far away you all are. We love you and miss you all. May 2012 be the year we catch up with every one of you at home, or somewhere in the world.

St Augustine

After a few days getting the fuel tank cleaned out and waiting out the wet windy weather in Fernandina Beach Marina, we headed back into the Waterway for the passage to St Augustine, and it was a pleasant and uneventful trip most of the way. We chugged along – there was a bit of wind and some yachts managed to make a bit of use of it. We passed Brian and Michelle aboard the Jennie B, whom we had met in Fernandina Beach. They are keen and skilful sailors, and when there isn’t enough wind, they just push their yacht along with the dinghy. The homes along the waterway seemed to grow larger and more luxurious with every mile, but apparently we ‘ain’t seen nothin yet’!

Unfortunately we ran into problems within sight of the St Augustine Municipal mooring field, missing the notorious ‘Red 60’ marker and striking the bottom quite hard. Common Sense was fine – Terry backed her out safely – but I was coming up the companionway steps at the time and landed flat on my back from the impact. Nothing broken, thank goodness, but a sore head and some colourful bruises. A well-padded bum is clearly an asset in these circumstances.

We’re in a mooring field here, where the reasonable price of $20 gets you your mooring, access to bathrooms and the cruisers’ lounge, internet, rubbish disposal, dinghy docking and pump-out. It’s calm and safe, and only a short dinghy ride into the historic downtown section of St Augustine, once a walled city and with a solid claim to be the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in America. The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed here in 1513 and the town was founded in 1565. One of the things Ponce de Leon was looking for was the Fountain of Youth – he didn’t find it, but it is here, and you can knock back a little paper cup of the nasty sulphurous stuff if you really want to. A 17^th century fort, the Castillo de San Marcos, dominates the view of the city from the water.

The town has plenty of ugly history – the death of local Indians from European diseases; the massacre of French Hugenots, a yellow fever epidemic that killed a third of the populace – but it is incredibly beautiful, with lavish Spanish-style architecture and fine gardens. Henry Flagler (Rockefeller’s partner in Standard Oil) was responsible for turning St Augustine into a tourist destination, building two fabulous hotels in the town and also commissioning the railway that effectively joined Florida to the rest of the country. The Hotel Ponce de Leon is now a private college, but it is open for tours (which help to fund the college’s program). It is clearly what you get when a billionaire says, ‘spare no expense!’ – Tiffany glass everywhere, 14 ct gold leaf in the vast murals, mosaics, carvings, terracotta work from Spain… and even new-fangled electric lights! It’s easy to imagine the wealthiest New York socialites in the early years of the 20^th century spending the winter season at dinners, balls, playing tennis, flirting and gossiping, or doing deals in the smoking lounge. Now the students of Flagler College get to live and study in what must be one of the most beautiful and extravagant campuses anywhere.

Lots of interesting little shops and specialised museums (the Lightner is terrific), good cafes (we liked the Spanish bakery for empanadas and excellent bread)and some pleasant bars for Terry to add to his beer repertoire, St Augustine was a great place to spend three or four days. And yes, it’s getting warmer as we work our way down the latitudes!

The Cold Grey Atlantic: ocean passage to Fernandina Beach

We’d had enough of hanging in the waterway waiting for bridges to open, huddling in our survival blanket through cold nights, and barely dodging shallow mudbanks. One guy we met in Deltaville told us he’d been aground seven times on the Georgia section of the ICW. There seemed to be only one solution – skip Georgia and the rest of South Carolina, and take to the high seas! So we waited one more day for better weather and headed out, bound for Florida and that elusive warm sunshine. Fernandina Beach at the northernmost coast of Florida seemed like a reasonable target – about 36 hours of continuous sailing. Conditions looked good, with 10 – 15 knot winds from the north and north-west, following seas and a strong tidal current to carry us out of Charleston to the sea.

 About nine other sailboats at the Charleston City Marina had plans to leave on the Thursday morning, but only one – a nice Island Packet that soon passed us – headed out at dawn. Before too long the sails were up and Common Sense was scudding happily along with waves, wind and tide all pushing us along. With the land almost invisible, we were still in quite shallow water about 30 ft  deep – quite different from our home coast in Western Australia, where it drops off to deep – and then to very very deep - quite quickly. Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins joined us from time to time, we saw some kind of a whale hanging in the water – I think it was a killer from the dorsal fin, but I’m not sure if they live here – and Terry had a seal pop up to check him out.

It was a long day, even though the course was fairly straightforward. The difference was that we would not be looking for an anchorage or a marina at the end of the day, but travelling through the night. I was a bit anxious at the prospect of being on watch and responsible for the boat while Terry slept, but the conditions were reasonable and the moon was nearly full. It would be OK. We’d be motoring on auto-pilot. It would be OK. The sun set and the moonlight was beautiful on the water. On my first watch, a pod of dolphins sped alongside, their fins dragging lines of phosphorescence through the water. It got colder and the wind and waves picked up. We were both frozen within our eight or so layers of clothing and I don’t think either of us really slept during our down time.

On my early am watch, the seas were big enough for some fairly serious rolling. Just enough for that edge of nausea to set in – combined with the cold, the anxiety and the sleeplessness it was reminiscent of a chemotherapy session.  Not exactly what I’d signed up for. I kept my spirits up by composing doggerel verses in my head (I highly recommend this – you can make yourself laugh at the worst of times). This one went something like:

I don’t want to drown in the cold grey Atlantic/I’d rather be somewhere warmer and calmer

The Mediterranean, blue and romantic/ or drinking cold beer on Grand Bahama…

And so on. The poem got worse, and so did the conditions.

And then, as we all know, the darkest hour is just before dawn. At 5am, on Terry’s watch, the alarm for the fuel filter came on. We switched to the second filter but there was gunk in that too and its alarm went off about twenty minutes later. Terry changed the fuel filters with the boat pitching and rolling, with me trying to steer the least rocky path down the waves (which I could barely see). We managed to putter along until the sun rose. Then it was up with the sails again, engine off and we  did a steady 5 to 6 knots, tacking a few times, all the way to the mouth of the St Mary’s River. Boat US were on standby, but Terry used our spare fuel and all our spare filters to motor gently into Fernandina Beach. We checked into the marina, which was expensive, but we needed to be on the dock to get our fuel tank cleaned out, and the conditions were getting colder and windier by the minute.  We had a hot shower, Terry cooked a great chicken stew in the pressure cooker and then we slept like a pair of corpses for about ten hours. Blissful.

Charleston, South Carolina

Hi y'all
This is a beautiful small city. The heart of Charleston is a two mile wide peninsula between the Cooper and Ashley Rivers, a very walkable community where beautiful old homes, courtyard gardens, massive spreading live-oak trees and spired churches of all denominations appear at every turn. The houses tend to be narrow fronted, with long porches down one side and barred basements and outbuildings. History provides the reasons for this design - residents were taxed according to their frontage; and the barred buildings housed slaves. There is a lovely historic waterfront, now dominated by the Arthur Ravenell Jnr Bridge, visible from the water long before you reach the city.

Charleston was the site of the first shots fired in the Civil War (known here as 'the recent unpleasantness' or 'the war of northern aggression' depending on the company you're in), at Fort Sumter. The city has survived military attacks, devastating fires, a major earthquake and Hurricane Hugo, so resilience is part of its character. I especially enjoyed the Museum of the Confederacy, a collection of artefacts collected from veterans themselves by the Daughters of the Confederacy. There are personal items like pocket bibles, tobacco pouches, letters from home; uniforms bearing pieces of red tape placed to show where bullets entered; home-made boots; an impressive collection of weaponry; haunting photographs of boys in oversized uniforms.

We've stayed on because the weather has turned awful - winds are gusting to 50mph and it's a bit scary. Here's Terry's Charleston news:

Well, here we are on the Megadock in a $2-a-foot marina with laid-on downtown shuttle etc.  We have multi-million dollar ocean liner boats like Rice Quarters and Themis for company.  Themis is owned by the lawyer who won $246 BILLION in damages from the cigarette companies for 46 US States.  Say his cut was 20%?  Rice Quarters is owned by his law firm partner.  Other boats in the line are not worth talking about, probably only in the $2 million vicinity.  Then there’s us in the cheap seats but everybody seems to like the look of ours.

http://www.charlestoncitymarina.com/photos.html

Having a great time.  Pass on that, I’m telling lies. This is more trouble than Irene was.  Luckily we’re on the inside and only being blown away from the dock and back.  Those on the other side of the dock are being whacked into it repeatedly and partly under it.

One boat, named Sovereign was anchored out in the channel.  It broke free and raced back into the Megadock, hit two power cruisers and did a lot of damage to one of them.  Apparently the owner is in DC and was coming down tonight to move the boat into the marina.  They rang him to tell him it was already here.  I was in the Marina Office paying up when the marina’s insurance guy was there.  The marina guy told him he didn’t know what sort of boat is was other than he thought is was a 40’ er.  I said it wasn’t, it was a 43.6’ er – it said so on the side.  The marina guy got the boat card out and said “well, he told me it was only 40’” so he changed it.

We’ve doubled up our lines at each end just for some peace of mind.  Probably no practical advantage.

The forecast said 15-20.  It’s been blowing over 50mph on a regular basis i.e. every few minutes in the squalls. Sustained 30+ so I guess most of the swing bridges up the ICW will be staying shut, forcing all up the line to back up for a few days.

Supposed to go down to 9 tonight and back around to the north.  Still a bit large outside but say 5-8’ swells.  Friday smaller, Saturday building a bit but we should be safely inside Fernandino Beach by then.

Charleston is a very nice place and the people have a very laid back and pleasant disposition.  They say that the only proper noun here is “Y’all”.  Even the Xmas flags have “Merry Christmas Y’all” on them.  It’s been voted the best-mannered city in the US something like 11 years running.

We’re hunkered down in here, snug and warm and just enjoying each other’s company, talking and sticking our heads up every now and then to see if Noah’s arrived with his ark yet.

We went off to the Charleston Museum yesterday afternoon with my friend Larry.  We went in his ex AirForce Step Van.  Carol's seat was an office chair attached to the desk in the back.  I sat on the speakers he used to use in his DJ Business.  It runs on oil he gets for free from the Chinese restaurant where he lives.  It has to be pre-heated before the diesel will start so he uses 2 golf-cart batteries to run everything.  They also run two domestic air conditioners he has poking out the side of the truck. It has an industrial horn jammed into the grill for a car horn.  Sounds good when it goes off, too.

We went into the markets this afternoon and visited the Confederate Museum.  Very interesting. Lots of down-home artifacts from the Southern side of what they call "the recent unpleasantness in these parts"

The boat in last pic got blown out of the anchorage, too.  Apparently the guy who owns it has been living on it for 17 years!!  It has no sails, has straps for dock-lines because he never ties up to anything and has a beat up umbrella for a bimini.  He said someone stole one of his anchors. He managed to maneuver to where he is - he's right in front of Themis, worth some $15 million. He's a bit strange.

Hope you are all well and happy.

Hoges double-tied and hanging on for dear life.

The Carolinas - Down the Icy W

Yes we did leave it a little late to join the snowbird exodus, so now we’re tagging along with the stragglers, feeling that icy chill at our backs (and most other places). Cold nights and the wind chill factor at the helm aside, there are some advantages in being a tail-ender, in particular the lack of crowding in anchorages and on the ICW itself.

Our last few days have mainly been spent negotiating canals and creeks down the east coast of North Carolina. Miles of waterside mansions, condos and a golf course every mile or so (I’ve seen this area advertised as the ‘Golf Coast’).  We saw the other side of things when we anchored in Calabash Creek and dinghied into the fishing village of Calabash to have a look around. We bought  fresh shrimps and flounder at a dockside stall and were offered a ride into town by a very generous local chap named John Brown (as a dedicated Confederate sympathiser, he was a little embarrassed about his name!) He seemed to know everyone we saw and was quite forthright in his opinions about what ‘Yankee money’ was doing to small communities like this.

Calabash Creek was a beautiful anchorage, by the way, with cypress forest and marshes providing habitat for dozens of different bird species, and a resident family of four dolphins for entertainment.

The South Carolina section of the waterway is generally less developed, with much of it still forest, marshland and vast acres of abandoned rice plantations which have not been cultivated since the end of the nineteenth century, when the end of slave labour meant that they were no longer economically viable. After a long cold day on the water we opted for a night at the Bucksport Marina, a friendly and pleasant stop where hot showers, great home-made burgers and power to heat the boat were very welcome. Ralph, the owner, told us that the site of the marina used to be a busy port for the export of cypress to England, and that the bottom of the canal here is filled with 300 year old ballast.

The next day was a big one – up at dawn to catch a strong tidal current up the Little River, alongside Myrtle Beach and past historic Georgetown, through Winyah Bay, the Minim Creek Canal, McClennanville, up Harbor River to an anchorage in a maze of marshes here in Awendaw Creek. It’s perfectly quiet and a half moon and thousands of stars are mirrored in the dark water. It’s hard to believe that just thirty miles away is the big city of Charleston. We should be there by noon tomorrow.

North Carolina, Waterworld

Here we are at a fine safe anchorage in Mile Hammock Bay, along with five other yachts and a little trawler. We’ve just been watching a pod of dolphins herding their evening meal – swimming in a tight circle, then slapping their tails on the surface of the water, to stun the fish presumably.  We’re now at the 244 mile mark of the ICW and there has been a marked change in the water and the weather. The former is now green and getting clearer and more oceanic. We’ve had dolphins for company a lot of the time – they seem to enjoy surfing along with the bow wave or in the wake. Today we had one either side of the boat, escorting us along the canal. The one on my side kept tipping her head sideways when she came up for air, just checking us out!

The weather has been beautiful, but Captain Dave tells us that this is unseasonal and that we can’t count on warmth until we make Florida. The east coast of North Carolina really is a water world. For a start there are the Outer Banks – ribbons of sandbank that run for over a hundred miles of the Atlantic coast, cut off from the mainland by a series of sounds. Inland from these sounds are marshes threaded through with rivers, creeks and canals. It is not at all surprising that this area was the favoured territory of Edward Teach (Blackbeard), the most notorious pirate of the Americas. You can readily imagine his flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge suddenly appearing from a hidden bay or inlet, terrorising the cargo vessels and the few ships that the British Navy provided for protection of the colony. The wreck of Blackbeard’s ship was located in the Beaufort Inlet in 1996 and artefacts are on display in the Beaufort Museum. They also say that the ghost of his murdered wife haunts his old house in Front Street.

Along with the green water and the balmy weather, there is a certain southern-ness in the voices and attitudes of the local people – like the friendly folk of Swansboro where we spent a pleasant night at Casper’s Marina and had a few beers at the local pub. You can certainly tell you’re in the South by the products in the supermarket – honey buns, collard greens, black-eyed peas and pig feet.

When you think about the Intra Coastal Waterway, you imagine a big canal cut through from Norfolk Virginia down to Florida, but a great deal of it is a combination of rivers and creeks, bays and inlets and other natural features. The canals just join these up. Along the section we did today, from Swansboro to Mile Hammock Bay, spectacular houses line the waterfront. Many have three or even four storeys, with balconies, widows’ walks and private jetties and boathouses. Everywhere people are boating and fishing, mostly in the flat-bottomed Carolina skiffs that are ideal for these shallow waters. Cormorants, gulls, ducks, brown pelicans, heron and egrets are everywhere.

Tomorrow we have a long run planned to Wrightsville Beach. On the way we’ll pass by Surf City (Two girls for every boy!) another one for our song lyric tour of the USA. Along with the obvious ones (Viva Las Vegas, New York New York, LA Freeway etc) we have actually been through Winslow Arizona and the West Texas town of El Paso… and In My Mind I’m Going to Carolina …