Southbound through St. Augustine

Stardust rocked from passing fishermen this morning at our anchorage just north of St Augustine on the ICW. That’s right, we’ve left Jacksonville and are headed south again! Yesterday was a marvelous day to depart with light winds, warm temps and sunny skies.

We had to wait for a rising tide nearing full in order to get out of the shallow harbor of Palm Cove Marina. They desperately need to dredge the whole marina. Stardust would lightly sit on the bottom at the slip during low tide. As I discovered while cleaning the hull with my dive gear, the bottom was a very fine mud which I could stick my arm into up to the elbow without even feeling it. So it didn’t matter that Stardust sat on the bottom. I cleaned the hull during high tide so there was room to move under the boat without stirring up the mud too bad. There weren’t too many barnacles, so the bottom paint is doing it’s job. The prop shaft zinc was almost gone due to the marina’s stray electric current in water, so I replaced that as well.

The forecast is for seas exceeding 5 feet for the next week, so it looks like we’ll be confined to the ICW as much as we would like to get out in the ocean and sail. But it will be fun to cover familiar territory including anchorages we have used before.