We flew home from Savannah and left the boat in Beaufort, SC to attend David’s family Thanksgiving/Family Reunion.  David’s grandmother started the tradition 94 years ago and his aunts and uncles have really done a great job in keeping it going.  It is a pot luck affair with lots of southern thanksgiving goodies and attended by 75-100 of David’s relatives.  this year his cousin Chuck’s son, Garrett made a special ale especially for our Thanksgiving feast.  Check out the label that he applied.  Really cute cousin and the ale was good.

     

After Thanksgiving, we flew back to Savannah, picked up the boat in Beaufort, and headed south to Georgia!

Here’s David:

We really liked Beaufort and the marina that Katie told you about in the last post. It was an interesting town, but what I enjoyed most was the swamps, Spanish moss, history and warmer weather… finally. Forrest Gump was filmed primarily in this area, and they have all of the filming locations on a map for you. We did go see the huge swamp oak, “Jennie’s Tree”, and the bridge over the Mississippi River that Forrest was filmed running over was actually the bridge from Beaufort to Lady’s Island. If you are a Forrest Gump fan, you’ve got to come to this place…

We soon found ourselves in Georgia. I had heard a lot of negatives about Georgia, the never ending curves, 8 foot tides, 4 knot currents, and the channels that hadn’t been dredged, leading to hard groundings. Well, all those complaints turned out to be true. It was also strikingly beautiful, eerie at times, and desolate, we saw far more porpoises than people. Several places worth mentioning – perhaps the worst was a spot right in the middle of 2 channel markers where we hit a hard ground going only 2 knots, the boat leaned over 30 degrees, spilling everything and breaking my coffee press with grounds and coffee all over everything. Katie managed to clean it up, bless her, we got off the high spot and went on, even more cautious than we had been doing.Can’t go much slower than 2 knots… Then we came to “Hell’s Gate”. A 1 mile cut, feared by everyone for it’s “skinny water” (lack of depth). Rather than go through it on an ebb tide, we anchored out at a beautiful spot and waited for low tide. We figured if we were going to ground, better to do it on a rising tide rather than a falling one… especially in 8’ tides… so we picked our way through it, and made it successfully, often slowly sliding through the mud on the bottom for long stretches.

Katie back:  So, we found some beautiful anchorages…quiet, desolate, and sometimes wild and disappearing!  We crossed from Georgia into Florida after encountering very heavy fog.  The Navy was moving a Trident submarine through the river into the sea, so we had to wait on one side of the river until they let the civilian boats go through…Hope it is headed somewhere nice for those boys and girls aboard and that they never need to use the “trident” part of the ship.

We were very excited to be in Florida!  And we found a couple of nice anchorages here too.  At one of them, David decided to try his fishing pole out and a sailboat coming in shouted out that he was not coming over for dinner if david was fixing whatever he caught.  It was our friends, Warren and Ernie from our homeport in Maryland.  We made arrangements to meet up the next day at the marina we were staying at in St Augustine and ended up having dinner with them and another friend. we also ran into a couple of cruisers we met in hampton, va and again in southport…it is a small community!

St Augustine is the oldest city in the US.  It was founded by Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565 and the city is filled with the colonial Spanish influence.  Really fun place, my mom went to nursing school not too far from here and sailed from Jacksonville to St Augustine.  I bet it was very different in the late 30’s!  It is a little over the top touristy now, but still a beautiful city. David and I toured it in trolley and by foot and really enjoyed our time there.

When we left St Augustine yesterday, a dense fog set in and the tide was low, so we waited it out for a couple of hours, decorated the boat for Christmas and pushed on and found an anchorage just north of Daytona.  The sky had cleared, we had shrimp, salad and a glass of wine and sat upstairs watching the full moon over the water and the Christmas lights and listened to Christmas music and whoa…what was that!  Porpoises and dolphins have been in and out, a few swimming aside the boat racing and a couple of what looks like very young dolphins swimming, but last night we saw and heard the blows of a manatee!  What a great night!

It is a beautiful day, we just had a boat pass us from Bethlehem, PA and David called them on the radio…they actually live in Hellertown on Water street…about a block from us.  We should be in FT Lauderdale in 4-5 days and then will be there or up in PA or in my case out in Oregon for a couple of weeks and then back down on Christmas Day to FT Lauderdale.

Cheers!

Kate & Dave

So we’re in Florida now… about to leave St Augustine. The fog is terrible, and the moon brought exceptionally high tides, so we are waiting both out. Hence, I have some time to write.