Low Country

We are under way northbound in the Atlantic Ocean, offshore of Bull Island as I start typing, bound for Winyah Bay and thence Georgetown, South Carolina. I expect we'll have the anchor down, likely somewhere in the Western Channel, right around dinner time. That means we'll either be eating a little early under way, or a little late after we're fully settled. We won't know until much later in the day, when the plotter will have a better idea of ETA than it does now.

Leaving Charleston Harbor with its iconic Ravenal Bridge this morning.

We spent two nights anchored off St. Simons after my last post. In the morning we tendered ashore to the marina, where dinghy access is now a staggering $20 per day, got the gate codes, and walked out to the parking lot, where our good friend John picked us up to run some errands. We dropped off the latest failed attempt at a new monitor at the UPS store for return to Amazon, and stopped in the very nice Harris Teeter store on the island for some fresh provisions. John gave us nice little tour of the island, slow-rolling a bit to wait out a torrential rain storm. We made it back to Vector without getting wet.

Passing St. Simons Lighthouse on our way out of St. Simons Sound.

In the evening we met John and Laura Lee at the same spot in the parking lot and drove out to Certified Burgers & Beverage for dinner. I don't know who certifies anything there, but the burgers were good and they had an excellent selection of drafts. More importantly, we really enjoyed catching up with them over dinner and drinks. It's easier to visit them here in their new location, a stone's throw from the ICW.

We passed this spiffy new compact buoy tender north of Beaufort, SC.

We found there is a new coffee place next to marina, in addition to our old dinner stand-by the Coastal Kitchen, and contemplated going ashore for breakfast, as our dinghy fee was good for 24 hours. Neither one of us was in a breakfast mood in the morning, so we just decked the tender and weighed anchor with the ebb. We'll try the coffee place next visit.

Not sure what these two sailboats though of having this crane swinging overhead at the Charleston City Marina this morning.

With calm conditions on the outside, we headed right back out into the ocean and turned for St. Catherines Sound, the last inlet north that we could comfortably make in the daylight. We had a mostly calm passage, but as we got closer to the inlet, increasingly urgent thunderstorm warnings were arriving on our weather receiver. I increased rpms and we made it over the shallow (10') bar at the entrance just before the storms hit.

This year's theme, so far. This was on our way in to St. Catherines.

That bar is still some 5 nautical miles offshore of the actual opening in the coastline, and so we still had most of an hour in open water before we could reach protection. The storm hit with a vengeance, with winds ramping up to 50 mph, about 45 knots, just forward of the starboard beam. Seas picked up to 3-4' and we bashed our way in, leaning heavily to port, the stabilizers pegged trying to compensate. Things got much more comfortable on the inside, and by the time we dropped the hook an hour later in a familiar spot on Cane Patch Creek (map), it was all over. Just one other boat was in the anchorage, an older Krogen a good distance away, and we had a quiet and comfortable night.

Our friend Ted hailed us on the radio as we were steaming up Calibogue Sound. He snapped this from his home. Photo: Ted Arisaka

In the morning we left on the ebb and made it through the notoriously shallow Hell Gate without incident on a falling tide. That put us against the current for most of the day, and it was a long slog through Savannah to Hilton Head Island. We made it to a familiar spot on Skull Creek (map) just before dinner time, and tendered ashore to the Skull Creek Boathouse for dinner. All three waterfront joints were packed for a Monday, with tourist season now in full swing. We strolled the shared parking lot and saw mostly out-of-state plates. We found the Boathouse a little more pleasant than Hudsons next door, at a slightly higher price.

Skull Creek Boathouse.

In the morning we once again left on the ebb, which gave us a fair tide crossing a very choppy Port Royal Sound, but then worked against us most of the day. We had so much adverse current passing Beaufort, SC, that I fell back on my river tactics for much of the passage, cutting the insides of all the turns just far enough off to keep our fins from dragging the bottom. We ended up at the Ashepoo-Coosaw cutoff, another notorious shallow section, at dead low tide. They were dredging it our last time through, and so we pressed on. We made it just fine, albeit with less than a foot under our keel in a few spots.

New sign near the Charleston City Marina dinghy dock (still $5/day).

We finally had a fair tide again after turning off Fenwick Cut into the South Edisto River, and we had the hook down in a familiar spot near the Prospect Hill Plantation (map) just in time for a scheduled 4pm phone call. We took the bald eagle on the piling of a small dock we passed as a good omen. We grilled steaks for dinner, but the greenhead flies were so numerous we could not enjoy the otherwise pleasant weather outdoors, and I had quite the challenge keeping them out of the boat while I was grilling. We fell asleep to the cacophony of frogs in the nearby marsh.

Rental e-bikes throughout Charleston. These are at Salty Mikes at the marina.

We awoke yesterday morning to fairly dense fog. Fortunately it thinned out just enough for us to get underway at 8:30 to catch high tide at Watts Cut. We had a fair tide to the North Edisto and then it was against us all the way to the Stono. We whizzed through Elliott Cut with a bit over a knot behind us, and were tied up on the "Megadock" at the Charleston City Marina (map) by 2pm. The marina is installing a massive new floating dock system and is a bit chaotic during the transition.

Drinking the Kool-Aid: the first Apple device aboard in eons. (OK, it's not real Kool-Aid in the cup.)

There is now an Amazon locker right at the marina, and I had three orders to pick up, including a new 8" tablet for the helm, to replace the old Lenovo that has too little memory to support the current revisions of our navigation apps. This is a never-ending escalation; the Lenovo had been the replacement for an earlier tablet when it, too, ran out of steam to support the ever more resource-intensive navigation apps.

New restaurant next to the Publix at Westledge, a short walk from the Brittlebank dinghy dock.

I also offloaded the e-bike and made a pilgrimage to the nearby Publix for provisions and to replenish the beer supply. We have driven out of Cigar City Maduro Brown Ale territory, but into Holy City Pluff Mud Porter territory, so I picked up a couple of six-packs. A new restaurant has opened up next to the Publix, useful to know for the next time we dinghy in to the park dock there.

Looks fine from the outside. I did not go in.

In the evening we took the marina shuttle into town for dinner. We ate at the bar at Halls Chop House, one of our long-time favorites, which has a little-known and reasonably-priced bar-only menu. Afterward we strolled around town a bit on a gorgeous evening before calling for a return shuttle to the marina. It was a nice stop, and quite luxurious, if a bit spendy, to stay at the dock for a change. We, of course, took advantage of the marina to top up our water and offload our recycling and trash.

Halls Chophouse. My sandwich is already gone.

After Louise turned in last night, I went out on deck to see if I could catch a glimpse of the evening's Starlink satellite launch atop a Falcon-9 from Cape Canaveral. I had low expectations; the sky was quite hazy, with only a few stars visible, and there was a full moon on top of the light pollution all around the harbor. We are also a full 250 nautical miles north of the cape. I was pleasantly surprised to see the rocket exhaust quite clearly through my binoculars; at this distance it appears quite red compared to the yellow-orange glow closer up. The second stage was harder to see, and I lost it briefly after main-engine cutout. A few minutes later I heard the Coast Guard answering someone reporting a flare sighting; the red exhaust and sharp cutoff does look a lot like a flare. 

The first Fort Sumter tour of the day. They came right up next to us from astern before turning to their dock.

This morning we dropped lines just as the ebb was starting, for a nice push all the way out of the harbor. Traffic was light, but I did need to alter my course to meet a towboat with a light barge on a short wire coming in from sea. It's a gorgeous day, and I am happy to be out here bypassing three very shallow stretches of ICW that require timing the tide. It also gives me this opportunity to catch up on the blog.

I had to adjust course for this empty mud scow on a short wire.

Our friends Cherie and Chris aboard Y-Not are somewhere on the ICW to our west even as I type, and it looks as if our paths will converge tomorrow near Georgetown. I think they are headed someplace quiet to escape the holiday crowds, whereas we will be continuing north, so we are going to connect tomorrow morning before I need to get to UPS and Walmart for my errands. I have no idea where we will end up tomorrow night.

Bullocks.

We are under way across the Northwest Providence Channel, with the Berry Islands receding behind us, and the Egg islands, northwest of Eleuthera, some five hours ahead of us on this heading. My chart says we are in 7,000' of water; the depth sounder only works down to 300' or so. Seas are relatively calm in a gentle breeze, but we very nearly turned around at 7am when the winds were higher than forecast. Fortunately they've settled a bit since our departure.

Sunrise this morning on our way out of the Great Harbour. Stirrup Cay at left, Great Harbour Cay at right.

The morning following my last post we found the forecast favorable for a two-day crossing of the bank, and we tendered back ashore for a final walk around the resort before departure. We needed to wait for a positive and rising tide before leaving the anchorage. The resort is in a perpetual state of unfinished construction, even as the older infrastructure is falling into disrepair; the massive marina pool and entertainment complex is closed altogether for a very slow refurbishing, and most of the ownership marina slips are empty.

We had lots of company crossing from Key Biscayne to Bimini. Yes, we are crabbing that much in the gulf stream.

I snapped this shot of Brown's Marina on our way into Bimini. Good memories there with our friend John.

Departing the Bimini Big Game Club in the tender after clearing in. If you zoom in you can see Vector in the distance just to the right of the big yacht. She is two miles away.

 We decked the tender and left our anchorage on a rising tide to make our way out of Bimini. The sounder read just seven and a half feet as we crossed the bar, turning north into the stream. Passing Paradise Point we were less than a mile from where we had anchored but it had taken us two and a half hours to get there.

"Slip repossessed." The state of affairs at Resort World Bimini.

Sunset beyond the Hilton, the nicest part of the Resort Wold complex.

After rounding North Rock we set a course for Bullock's Harbour on Great Harbour Cay, in the Berry Islands. Our Starlink terminal lost service a couple of hours later, but before it did I was able to reach the Great Harbour Cay Marina and reserve a slip; the protected anchorage in the harbor is minuscule and we simple could not bank on finding a spot there.

"Please use your Starlink on land..."

Near the halfway mark we diverted a few miles south to anchor on the northern reaches of the Mackie Shoal (map). We had a very rolly night, and really for naught. Yachts of various sizes as well as several mail boats (small inter-island freighters) passed us all night long as they criss-crossed the bank, and next time we need to do this we'll just leave at sunset and go overnight. We did have a nice sunset and a relaxing dinner on board, and with no Internet we both turned in early.

Freighters, aka mail boats, like this one passed us all night long.

Sunset over the bank. Always an eerie feeling with uninterrupted water all 360° of the horizon.

Sunday we weighed anchor just as soon as we finished our first cup of coffee. Our Starlink started working again a couple of hours outside the harbor, and we were making our way through the narrow land cut at high tide by 2pm. By 2:30 we were tied to the dock (map) and getting the lay of the land. The marina is in good shape by Bahamian standards, and with a reasonable rate that becomes even more so on a weekly or monthly basis. With no weather windows to get anyplace else in the next few days, we opted to ask for a week.

I plotted our loss/acquisition of Starlink on the chart for future reference with this pair of cyan waypoints.

I spent most of the first two days of our stay working on the watermaker, which had refused to make any water on our way to Bimini or on our way across the bank. I ran another batch of cleaning chemicals through it and recalibrated the salinity probe using my handheld meter, and I double-checked that we had good pressure and no air in the feed lines. When I was all done it was making water that met minimum drinking standards, but by no means great water at over 500ppm of total dissolved solids (TDS). We ran it for a couple of hours in the harbor and called it good enough before shutting it down to preserve the filters.

The view of the marina from our flybridge.

We most likely need a new membrane, although we can't rule out a problem with the Clark pump. When I was not working on the system, I was instead surfing the Internet trying to source a membrane that we could pick up in the Bahamas for a reasonable price. Thus far I have come up empty. If we can't eek out enough acceptable water from the system when we start to run low, we'll have to buy what we need. The marina would have sold us water for $0.50 per gallon, but that's on the higher end of water pricing in the islands. They did give us as much non-potable wash water as we needed, and Louise used the marina washing machines to do a couple of large loads at $5 each. We used our own dryer; even at the marina rate of $0.75/kWh, it was cheaper than the coin machines.

We rode around the long-abandoned and now overgrown vehicle turn-around at the north end of the island.

There is nothing at all, really, in walking distance of the marina. They did have bicycles available for guest use, and someone was renting motor scooters. Seeing the rental scooters, I asked in the office if it would be a problem to use our own (we had been told once in Bimini that it was not permitted), and they assured us it would not be. So we offloaded them and went on a little tour of the island, riding literally every paved road to its end.

The view out over the Great Harbour from a spot near the north end. You can see the cruise ship docked at CoCo Cay. Our former and future anchorage is to the right near the tower.

There is one settlement on the island, Bullock's Harbor, a couple of miles from the marina by road. The government dock is here, where the supply boat lands, along with a couple of churches and some recreation facilities for the locals. A general store for groceries, a small hardware store, a liquor store, a bar, and one restaurant round out the offerings in town.

The southernmost end of the road, where it turned to soft sand, looking out over the ocean side.

Elsewhere on the island is a small airstrip, and along the coast are homes varying from palatial down to beach bungalow that belong predominantly to foreigners, mostly Americans. The reason there is anything here at all, apart from the original settlement at Bullock's Harbor, is owing to an enormous failed resort development that wrested the fortunes of the island from the drug cartels that had been using it as a stopover.

Entrance to the old clubhouse. We ascended the stairs at the back.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, developers bought most of the island and sank $38 million into building a resort, over $300m in today's dollars. The marina where we were staying was hewn out of bedrock and a channel cut through to the sea, and a championship 18-hole golf course was blazed through the Bahamian scrub, with luxurious paved cart paths and well-manicured fairways. An immense clubhouse with sweeping vistas and a massive pool deck sat at the apex of the course, connected to the marina by a walking path. A "beach club" bar was erected on the ocean side adjacent to the airstrip. It was all very high end, and the rich and famous were enticed to buy ocean-front, bay-front, or golf course lots and build nice homes to suit.

As seen from the pool deck. The pool is less inviting now.

Like many plans to build high-end resort properties in the Bahamas, the effort was doomed by overwhelming logistical challenges and miscalculation of the difficulty in running a western first-world establishment by imposing an American value system on a country that runs on island time. The development changed hands several times and eventually just stopped, leaving the homeowners holding the bag. The rich and famous have long since cut their losses and moved on, and the nice homes that still stand after the storms that ravage the island periodically now belong mostly to Americans of more modest means, who can live or vacation without the first-world amenities of golf courses, country clubs, or even a decent restaurant serving international or American fare.

We stopped at the New Beach Club for a beer and fries. It was the busiest place on the island. They close at 4 so it's not a dinner option.

The marina hangs on because it was built like the proverbial brick house, with concrete docks. And the bones of the old clubhouse are still intact, though the wood roof has caved in, and exploring the ruins is even listed on the island's web site as one of the handful of activities here. What's left of the beach club has re-opened as The New Beach Club, a beach bar and burger shack that also caters to cruisers anchored in the nearby bay.

Coming back from a walk we spotted this pair of manatees in the marina.

While we continued to wait on good travel weather I continued to knock out projects. A whole day was given over to the tender, where I replaced the wiring to the navigation lights and installed the new steering cable I bought back in the states. This latter project involved much swearing, as the original outfitter did not install the helm at the correct angle, and the new cable had to be coaxed into place with much effort and way more tools than I expected to use for the project. I also got the snaps installed for the saloon window covers, breaking a tap in the process

Nothing like the sinking feeling of breaking the end of your tap off in the aluminum under your brand new paint job. It took me an hour to worry it out.

The end result, as best I could capture around the fashion plate. Just a re-do of the original installation in 2016, necessitated by the painting.

We mostly ate our own food aboard with three notable exceptions. Friday night was the weekly "grill and chill" at the marina pavilion, where you order barbecue ahead of time and free rum punch is provided. Some local ex-pats provided live music and we got the chance to meet a few of our neighbors. One night we rode into town for dinner at Coolie Mae's, pretty much the lone sit-down place on the island. And Saturday is pizza night at the marina, where you place your order in the morning and you pick it up at dinner time from a couple of Bahamians who bake them in the kitchen of what's left of the even more exclusive private club, long shuttered, on the marina property. Mediocre pizza for 30 bucks, but it's the only game in town. We had opted out of the weekly marina pot luck, which was probably the most social evening, but we generally do not care for pot-luck dinners.

Coolie Mae's. We were the only patrons at the sunset hour.

It was too chilly and buggy to eat on the deck but I stepped outside to get this sunset photo.

As luck would have it, a weather window coincided with our one-week mark, and yesterday we dropped lines just before the tide dropped to an uncomfortable level for the skinny parts of the channel, after lunch. Louise started the dinner before lunch, whereupon we discovered that the supposedly sealed package of chicken we had thawing in the fridge was not sealed, and it leaked all over the inside of the fridge, ruining the next month's worth of fresh romaine. Oh well. Fortunately it was discovered while we were still at the dock where we could offload the mess and use some free water for the cleanup. The marina assessed a 5% surcharge for using a credit card when we checked out, which we just paid because finding more cash in the Bahamas can be daunting.

Sunset beyond Stirrup and Little Stirrup Cays, quiet after the cruise ships departed, as seen from our anchorage in Great Harbour.

Getting over the shoals before low tide put us on the edge of the bank before the deepwater seas had laid down, and we bashed our way off the bank and around the west end of Little Stirrup Cay, or as its owner Royal Caribbean Cruises calls it, CoCo Cay. They've built a pier for two mega cruise ships here since our last visit, which was fully occupied as we passed, and the island was packed. Stirrup Cay a little further east and belonging to Norwegian Cruise Lines, was empty, with no ships in the anchorage.

A short while later we had a spectacular moonrise over the harbor entrance.

We curled all the way around Stirrup Cay and into the Great Harbour, where we anchored a few years ago, and tucked as far into the lee as we could get for the night (map). We had a quiet night, save for the hum of the island generator, with just a little bit of roll. This morning we weighed anchor at dawn, leaving the harbor before the enormous Norwegian Epic began disgorging its passengers ashore via tender. The last time we were here, we were buzzed by rental jet skis throughout the day.

Once we left the harbor entrance this morning we could see Norwegian Epic freshly anchored on the deep side.

As I wrap up typing we are offline again, service having cut out a dozen or so miles from Great Harbour Cay. We now have 13,000' under our keel, and the plotter is projecting an arrival  little after 4pm. I expect we'll get our Internet back a bit sooner than that and I will upload the post.

Gratuitous shot of the famed water from our ride around the island.

Update: We are anchored in Royal Island harbor (map), a natural protected harbor within the eponymous island. The island itself is private, home to an on-again, off-again exclusive resort development -- no one ever learns that lesson here. The Starlink came back online too close to land for me to get all the photos squared away before I had to quit to navigate through the cuts. If all goes well, tomorrow at high tide we will make our way to Spanish Wells, another stop we've not previously made. After that, things are a bit unclear, and will depend largely on the weather. The forecast right now is calling for trade winds, so perhaps when we are done there we will work our way south along the west coast of Eleuthera.

Going north to go south

We are back underway, downbound on the St. Johns River, bound for the coast and points south. As the St. Johns is one of the few navigable rivers in the US that flows north, we are, for the time being, northbound. We will resume our generally southbound journey when we reach the ICW in a few days.

We rented a golf cart one pleasant evening with Stacey and Dave and drove around the historic district to see the lights. This was one of the more nicely decorated homes.

We had a lovely stay in Sanford. What we had originally planned as a one-month stay ended up morphing into a full seven weeks, owing in part to a one-week excursion to California, and in larger part to me being down for the count for over a full week due to whatever crud I picked up on the plane.

Sanford is one of those places that can easily suck you in. A combination of inexpensive dockage, a dozen or so restaurants a short walk from the dock, groceries and other services easily accessible, and a packed community events calendar conspire to overcome the wanderlust that motivates many cruisers. Indeed, the majority of marina denizens seem never to leave the dock, and one wonders if some of them cruised in for a short stay and then never left.

Draft beers at Hollerbach's German restaurant with Stacey, Dave, Liz, and Gary. That's our friend Eckhard at right; we wanted to catch him perform before we left town.

The additional draw for us, of course, was the ability to spend the holidays with friends, who also provided us with fantastic home-cooked holiday meals. And I would be lying if I did not admit that easy access to their car for errands further afield was convenient. Even so, we were ready to leave by New Years. Other than that pesky cold, and a big unfinished project which it had deferred.

That project involved relocating the tender battery and re-routing all the electrics, a big job that included cutting holes and then painting them first. We couldn't really leave with the tender all torn apart, and by the time I was fit enough to finish it up, I had to dance around the weather. The tender is all back together now, even if I did not get to installing the new steering cable I bought while we were in town, a separate project that will now need to happen at some later stop. I'm sorry to say that several other projects I intended to tackle in Sanford are also similarly deferred.

I relocated this battery box and its mess of cables to the enclosed compartment under the seat., to move weight forward and get it all out of the weather.

While we were in Sanford we made the decision to go to the Bahamas this season. Regular readers will remember that our last Bahamas cruise was cut short by the pandemic, and we've been biding our time waiting to return.  The time to be positioning for that is now, and we set Monday of this week as our departure date, for a leisurely cruise downriver and along the coast to position ourselves for an early February departure.

That was not to be, as no sooner had we made those plans than a huge storm system was forecast for Tuesday, the one that just clobbered the whole east coast, with high winds and possible tornadoes. Even though we prefer to be at anchor than at a dock for high winds, we opted to remain in port so that we had an escape option in the event of a tornado warning. Thus we delayed our departure to Wednesday.

I hauled myself out of bed at 02:15 to catch the first United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur launch, on the first moon shot from US soil in half a century.

I thought that would leave us a nice leisurely cruise downriver, perhaps stopping at the state park and maybe another couple of pleasant anchorages, and ending with our customary overnight stop in our nominal home town of Green Cove Springs before landing back at the Florida Yacht Club, all before the scheduled closure for maintenance of the FEC railroad bridge in Jacksonville on the 22nd. Alas, it was not to be. We have another storm forecast for tonight with possible tornadoes, and after only one day back on the river we decided to expedite our arrival at the yacht club to be tied up for the storm.

Wednesday was, in fact, a leisurely day. After getting the scooters back on deck and checking out with the office, we had an easy three-hour cruise back downriver to the River Forest oxbow anchorage in DeLand (map). We did have a tense moment as we approached the partly dismantled remains of the Whitehair bascule bridge, which, on our upriver journey in November, we had to have opened in the fog. The crane doing the demolition is on a spud barge that is taking up most of the navigation channel. We figured we had about three feet on either side as we squirted through with a knot behind us; I drove from the flybridge, which I otherwise only use for docking and locking.

Squeaky. Louise set the fenders and I drove from upstairs, in case the following current got us cattywampus.

In a plan that was hatched at the very last minute during tearful goodbyes, we tendered back to the boat ramp at the Ed Stone park adjacent the bridge, where Dave and Stacy met us in the car and drove us into town for one final meal together. We are going to miss our weekly dinner dates.

Louise snapped this shot from the pilothouse as we squeezed through the gap.

Yesterday morning we were still in "leisurely" mode when we weighed anchor after 9am. It did not take long, though, before we were discussing options for tonight's tornadic storm. Fortunately, with over a knot behind us, no traffic on the river, and an early enough start, we figured we could just make Palatka by the end of the day, and all the way to the yacht club today. It meant forgoing the leisurely cruise and the other stops, but it's the wise choice,  and we ended yesterday tied up again to the free dock at Corky Bell's (map) in East Palatka.

I had to keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the water, so the best I could do was spin around and snap this view astern right after we cleared.

We got an early start this morning, and as I am typing the rain has already started, and visibility is down to a half mile. We'll be arriving to the yacht club at half tide falling, which will make for an interesting arrival. On the plus side of all this, our early arrival here means we might catch our friends Erin and Chris aboard Barefeet, who are departing Lambs Marina on Sunday and are themselves headed to the Bahamas.

In our final days in Sanford, while we still had access to a car, we made a pilgrimage to Costco, two Walmart runs, and stops at Aldi and Winn-Dixie to provision for the Bahamas. We still have more to get, including a gross or so of beers and 15 gallons of spare gasoline, as well as the fresh items that we will get just before the crossing. We may be sitting a bit lower in the water now. Oh, and the lake came down 8" since we arrived, so we had just a foot under the keel in a few spots.

The trees on the patio at Celery City Craft Beer were very festively lit for the holiday season.

We'll be in Jacksonville for a few days, trying to catch up with friends, doing more provisioning while we have a free dock, and taking care of some of those unfinished projects. It's cold this far north, so we are highly motivated to get back to the coast and turn south again.

Mid-Florida holidays

We are docked at the Downtown Sanford Marina in the lovely community of Sanford, Florida (map).  We've been here over two weeks already, and have been quite busy seeing the sights, catching up with friends (and meeting some new ones), and knocking things off the project list. How we came to be here is something of a story in itself.

Thanksgiving dinner aboard Stinkpot with Stacey and Dave.

One of the problems with landing in an interesting place, and particularly if I also have a long project list, is that finding a chunk of time to update the blog does not readily bubble to the top of the to-do list. It's been more than three weeks since I posted here, and if I don't get something posted I'll be even more hopelessly behind.

Vector at Corky Bells. CAUTION! Floating Dock. Uh, OK.

When last I posted here we were in Green Cove Springs, our nominal home town. Things had dried up enough to go ashore for dinner, and we walked over to the local Italian standby, D'Fontana, which happens to have decent pizza along with some other dishes. We looped back through the library on the way so that Louise could also pick up a card.

As seen from the restaurant, which has a very nice deck and tiki bar.

Friday morning as we were weighing anchor, the local police boat came by to see if we were moving. It turns out the American Cruise Line ships are nowadays actually coming alongside the end of the city dock, and one was inbound that afternoon. We would have made it a tight fit for them, and the PD left us to ask a few other boats to move as well. There is just barely enough depth in this part of the harbor for us, and ACL draws another foot or so.

A calm morning on the river.

After maneuvering back out into the deeper part of the river, we turned upriver for the first time in eight years. Back in 2015 we had done most of the navigable length of the St. Johns river, and while it was beautiful and we had a lovely cruise, we've not been called very loudly to repeat it. But a magical confluence changed that for us on this trip.

"The real Florida." A shack, with a giant slide, and a seaplane.

For starters, the water level is higher. Long-time readers may recall we turned around at the Sanford Railroad Bridge last time, because we did not feel the depth of the lake supported a safe transit for Vector. That was partly the water level, much lower than right now, and also partly the lack of good soundings, and our chart tools are also much better now.

Sunset over Lake George.

The other, more compelling, reason is that we had [summons Marlon Brando voice] an offer we couldn't refuse. To wit, our friends Dave and Stacey, aboard Stinkpot, invited us to a home-made Thanksgiving dinner. Long-time readers will know that, every year at this time, I have something of a mad scramble to find a place for the holiday meal, and they may also remember that Dave has cooked us a wonderful Thanksgiving repast once before, when we were stuck in the shipyard in Bayou la Batre.

Vector anchored in the River Forest oxbow.

The confluence of the Thanksgiving invitation, a higher water level, our fondness for the St. Johns, and nothing else on the schedule, along with several exhortations from both the Stinkpot crew and our friends Cherie and Chris aboard Y-Not (also docked in Sanford, but absent her crew at the moment) that we were really missing out by not having stopped here, persuaded us to make the journey this time.

More real Florida. This houseboat has been here a while.

We had a short and easy cruise to Palatka, where we hoped to tie up at the free downtown dock. Unfortunately there is but one spot on that dock which fits us, and it was occupied. The dock we used on our last visit, while not explicitly signed to this effect, is now shown in our guide as permitted only for vessels up to 17'. So we fell back to plan B, which was to continue a half mile upriver to the sturdy deepwater dock at Corky Bells Seafood Restaurant (map) in East Palatka, where we remembered a decent meal from our last trip.

As has this former tugboat, taking up the only anchor spot deep enough for Vector on this stretch of river.

As we backed away from the free docks and made our about face, the nearby marina hailed us, hoping to make a sale. We could not escape without a lecture on the deficiencies of free docks. The restaurant did not disappoint, and neither did the dock, which we had to ourselves, even on a busy Friday evening. It was better than we remembered, inexpensive, with draft beer and great homemade hush puppies. A few patrons strolled the docks in the evening and we overheard one fellow explaining to his companion that Vector was a "million dollar boat." I'll keep that in mind when we are ready to sell.

Captain/chef Dave, serving the Thanksgiving meal, all prepared in his minuscule galley.

Saturday morning we enjoyed a nice walk around the area, which sports a gas station/c-store, a grocery store, and a hardware store, before dropping lines and continuing upriver to Lake George. Expecting northerlies, we made a hard right and dropped the hook in the lee of the north shore (map). It would have been a short ride back to a restaurant, but we wanted to enjoy the quiet of the lake from our deck for dinner. River traffic was light for a pleasant Saturday.

Postprandial Thanksgiving sunset.

Sunday was much busier as we passed through the bustling metropolis of Astor. The same high water that is enabling our lake visit had lots of riverside property there partially flooded, which meant idle speed and no wake all the way through the area. The Whitehair drawbridge, in Deland, on the cusp of being replaced permanently by a high bridge, is now operating on a once-hourly schedule, so rather than try to time the opening we stopped just short, dropping the hook in an old oxbow known as River Forest (map).

These signs pop up all over downtown on a regular basis.

This turned out to be a very picturesque anchorage and we enjoyed it very much. We did splash the tender and make the mile and a half trip up to the bridge for dinner at the St. Johns River Grill, which has its own courtesy dock and inexpensive drafts. The food was decent, if a bit odd that Louise's BLT was fried.

The closure was for this street fair, which we passed on the way to dinner.

Monday morning we awoke to thick fog, and we ruminated about delaying our departure. That would mean a full hour, due to the bridge schedule, and seeing that it was thinning out we decided to weigh anchor at the appointed time and proceed slowly using radar. The fog was gone by the time we cleared the bridge. We could easily have made it all the way to Sanford by the afternoon, but we wanted to have plenty of buffer to pick our way through the lake and into the marina, so we instead dropped the hook at Butchers Bend, just shy of the bridges.

Glass calm in Butchers Bend (before anyone else showed up). I love these kinds of reflections.

We had anchored here last time through, but lacking charts with accurate soundings, we only stuck our nose in. On this visit we we able to get all the way to the back of the oxbow and dropped in the perfect spot (map). We had the bend to ourselves for a while, but by nightfall a motorsailer and a pocket trawler had joined us. Oddly they set in completely different directions due to some weird eddies in the bend. Unlike the previous day, the river was quite busy, particularly as we made our way past Hontoon Island State Park.

Approaching the Sanford bridges, where we turned around last time.

Tuesday morning after a very leisurely coffee we weighed anchor for the final leg, breaking new ground for us and crossing Lake Monroe. We did go over one 7.3' spot in the lake, which means if the level drops more than 1.3' while we're here, we will have to pick our way through when we leave. We're half way there, down about 0.6' since arriving.

Dinner at Busters, one of a dozen or so restaurants just a short walk from the marina.

Dave had facilitated our communication with the marina when we booked, and he was able to wave them off from coming down the dock to help. That did not stop a handful of dock neighbors who wanted to be helpful, but I think Dave and Stacey managed to convince them we preferred to just do it ourselves, so instead we just had an audience. Dave captured our arrival on video, and set it to music to hilarious effect. Well, we cracked up when we saw it, anyway.

Vector arrives to Sanford Marina. Credit: Dave Rowe.

In addition to enjoying a fantastic spread with them for Thanksgiving, we've connected with Stacey and Dave over dinner or other activities quite a few times since arriving. That would including taking in Dave's weekly performances over at The Sullivan pub, which has excellent draft beer and a small selection of Irish fare. We also just seem to bump into them fairly regularly.

Thanksgiving dinner, just before we decimated it. We also had leftovers for days.

As Chris and Cherie had forewarned us, Sanford hosts numerous events and fairs in the historic downtown, and thus far it's been more than one a week. Many involve street closures of one kind or another. Thus far we've seen a street market, the holiday tree lighting, and the lighted holiday parade, and we've passed up two or three other events. Sanford is evidently a weekend destination for residents of the greater Orlando metropolitan area.

Dave on stage at The Sullivan. The food is good and the drafts a generous 20 ounce pour.

One of the many things to do in Sanford is to take a lake and river cruise on the classic sternwheeler Barbara Lee, which berths right here in the marina. We noticed they did two back-to-back Thanksgiving dinner cruises, for example. Last week we had a little excitement in the marina, as she got cattywampus in the fairway coming back from a cruise, and took out a charter sailboat with her starboard wheel (the twin stern wheels are her only propulsion). Stacey caught it all on video, and her clip ended up on the local news. We rushed over from our distant slip but missed the key moment.

Barbara Lee takes out a sailboat (at about 6:40). Video: Stacey Guth.

We had a little lake cruise of our own, as new friends Gary and Liz dropped by in their express cruiser to take us for a spin further south, into parts of the river that will not carry Vector's draft. Lake Monroe is really the end of the line for us. We stopped for lunch at the restaurant near their home marina at the south end of the lake.

A boatman's holiday. On the lake with captain Gary at the helm.

It's not all been fun and games, as I had a number of items delivered to the marina on the day we arrived, looking forward to a bit of downtime to get a few things done. Right out of the gate was a new laptop for myself. Disappointingly, the one I bought just a couple of years ago, which suited me quite well at the start, has reached the end of the road, with a swelling battery pushing the case apart under the keyboard. The earliest I could get a replacement battery would have been January.

Vector at the dock, seen as we depart on our cruise.

Between the battery problem and the case starting to break down, I decided to just bite the bullet and buy something "new" to replace it, by which I mean a lightly used one from eBay. I bought a name brand this time (Acer) since, clearly, the direct-from-China brands do not have parts availability here.

We've had three SpaceX Falcon 9 launches since we arrived. This one is about to head through the clouds, as see from our deck. We are 42 nautical miles from the launch pad.

The new laptop has a different type of SSD slot than the old one, so it was not a simple matter of just moving the drive. So I also took the opportunity to change to a slightly different Linux flavor, upgrade to a larger drive, and just generally clean things up. That turned the project into more or less a three-day marathon.

It's only slightly less nerve-wracking to pry the back off a used computer than a brand new one. The SSD is at lower right.

Not content to just tackle the easy Linux stuff, I also chose this stop to do battle with my nemesis, the Windows system that serves as our main chart plotter. The computer came with Windows 8.1, and I was content to just run that forever, passing up the many offers to update to Windows 10 over the years. But lately I am getting more and more end-of-support messages from various other pieces, including Chrome and Google Drive, and I finally relented. Or at least I tried to.

My life for the better part of two weeks. The most frustrating aspect was that it took hours to get to this error screen each time I tried.

I'm going to guess I now have close to 50 hours into trying to get the machine to upgrade in-place to W10, but with no success. I've given up, and instead I removed Google Drive and switched the browser to the Extended Support release of Firefox, which should buy me another year or so. After which I will need to buy a new system, and that will be the final demise of the now-unobtanium chartplotting software that serves as a backup and also the repository of some of our older track and waypoint data.

The holiday tree-lighting ceremony.

I really thought I'd be doing more work with my hands over the past few weeks, and I don't mean typing. However, I've only managed a couple of projects on that front, including repairing the e-bike tire that I mentioned in the last post. I also managed to give away the 8D batteries that we removed from the thruster system, insisting that the young couple who took them actually do the heavy lifting, literally, to get them off the boat.

Freshly changed air filter, alongside the old one.

Louise and I did some rust/stain remediation and documented some bedding issues to see if the yard will just handle them as warranty.  And I've knocked out a few minor things here and there like changing out the main engine air filter, which was gray from all the yard dust still in the engine room when we departed, and replacing both the shower sump and shaft log sump pumps, which failed within a day of each other after we arrived here.

This rust staining under the anchor roller is likely from improper bedding of the fasteners. The whole roller has to come off to fix it, and I am hoping the yard will just take care of it at one of their Florida locations.

We have enough to do that we opted to take the more attractive monthly rate and stay at least a couple of weeks, so long as the water stays up. Having decided that, and securely in our slip, it was a very short leap to thinking that, with the boat well secured in a relatively inexpensive marina, and with friends in the same marina who could keep an eye on the boat for us, that we could finally break the pandemic travel moratorium, get on a plane, and go back to California for our first visit since the beginning of 2020.

I am very happy to have these two giant batteries off the boat. Each one outweighs me.

And thus it is that I am typing this at 30,000', as we wing our way to San Francisco for a week-long visit. Dave and Stacey are minding the boat, with our next-slip neighbors also keeping an eye on things. It was a last-minute decision and we had to take pot luck on flights and hotels, but we managed to pull it together so long as we did not push too close to the holidays and their concomitant chaos.

There is no recycling at the marina, and we had over a month's worth, so we borrowed Dave's car and made a pilgrimage to the county facility. They take *everything*, from fluorescent lamps to motor oil to e-waste. We'll be back with our collected accumulation of this last item.

We've lined up a number of visits with friends and family, but I am still working on the schedule even as we're en route. If you are in the Bay Area but have not yet heard from me, please reach out. It's a short trip of just a week, and I expect we will have something on the schedule every waking minute.

"Krampusnacht" spilling out of Hollerbach's German Restaurant into the plaza. A Krampus is sitting on the edge of the fountain and others are strolling.

We'll be back in Sanford in a week, and we have our fingers crossed that the lake will not drop more than a few inches in that time. That will bring us right up to the holidays, and we've again been invited to a home-cooked dinner, so barring any undue drop in the lake level, I expect we'll be in Stanford to the end of the year. That will let us add a couple to our already lengthy list of local restaurants, including The District Eatery (ok but spendy for the area), El Zocalo (classic Mexican fare), Filomena's (good pizza right at the dock), Wop's Hops (classic tap room), The Old Jailhouse (good food in an old jail), The Station (good burger joint with a nice draft selection), The Breezeway (featuring an enormous pork schnitzel sandwich that two of us could not finish in a nice outdoor venue), Zorba's (decent Greek fare), and the Colonial Room (an uninspiring breakfast).

The band in Hollerbach's bierhalle for Krampusnacht. We have yet to eat here but we had a nice draft in the bar.

From there, things get a bit murky. After heading back downriver, which means north, we will turn south along the coast to at least Palm Beach. Regular readers will know that we cut short a Bahamas cruise when the pandemic struck, and perhaps this is the year we will pick that up where we left off, assuming I have everything ship-shape on the boat.

The holiday parade. I could not get close enough for a decent pic, but we enjoyed it from our sidewalk table a half block away.

In any case, it will likely be the new year by the time you hear from me again. And so we wish you the happiest of holiday seasons, whichever holiday(s) you celebrate.