A little north of St. Augustine, FL

Sunday December 4, 2016
29 55 756 N
81 18 349 W

We were up at 5:30 AM and underway by 6 AM. It was very still and totally dark, but we are pretty good at navigating in the dark these days. In fact, I enjoy bringing the boat alive in the dark of an early morning. The forecast called for 10/15 SE and waves of 2' to 4' which seemed decent. My only concern was the entrance at St. Augustine, as it is a "natural" inlet that was affected by Mathew and can be a bit difficult in bad weather.

It all looked OK as the sun rose.

All went well until we were a couple of miles off shore, but still in the entrance. It might have been a wind VS. current situation and conditions were not at all "comfortable". I felt conditions would improve once we turned, but was thinking about the St. Augustine entrance in the same conditions. Deidre was also uncomfortable with the conditions. So we turned around and headed south on the ICW. All up, we "wasted" two hours but probably made a wise decision.

We are now anchored for the night in the Tolomato River, a few miles north of St. Augustine. We set the anchor pretty hard as there is quite a tidal current in the river, maybe 2 knots, and the anchor needed to manage a 180% turn when the tide changed It had been a long day (66 NM) but we managed to stay up and watch the turn of the tide to make sure the anchor re set OK. All was well and we hit the sack.

Cumberland Island Anchorage

Saturday December 3, 2016
30 45 708 N
81 28 416

We managed to sleep until about 9 AM, but took it easy and did not up-anchor until almost Noon. We did not have far to go, our plan was to head to Cumberland Island, anchor for the night, and head out the St. Mary's entrance early next morning. (Cumberland Island is on the Georgia side of the border with Florida.) This entrance services the Kings Bay nuclear sub base.

All went to plan and we were anchored before 4.00 PM.

Brunswick Harbor, GA

Friday December 2, 2016 (And some of Saturday)
31 06 00 N
81 27 00 W

Planned an easy day today, about 30 miles to Beaufort, SC, in anticipation of heading out into the Atlantic on Saturday and running 160 NM overnight to St. Augustine, FL. But as we made our way south to Beaufort we checked the weather forecast only to discover that the weather in the zones we would be crossing was deteriorating and we could expect "6 footers" on Saturday and Saturday night. So instead we decided to just keep on going past Beaufort and get as many of the Atlantic miles as we could before the weather changed.

This tug was pulling a whole train of barges loaded with dredging gear

Heading south in this section of the Atlantic we had several "bail out" entrances to choose from:
     Brunswick                  71 NM       10 hours    2 AM
     Cumberland Island       92 NM      13 hours    5 AM
     St. Johns River          109 NM      16 hours    8 AM
     St. Augustine             135 NM      19 hours    11:30 AM

We made it to the sea buoy off Beaufort (The entrance is officially called Port Royal) at 4 PM and at that moment decided to head for Brunswick. After all, its not a race! (Really?)

The Atlantic was quite pleasant as the sun set - maybe 10/15 mph winds and 2' to 3' waves on our stern. Easy-peasey. The last time we were in the Atlantic at night we had Cavara for company. Tonight we were by ourselves and its a funny feeling to being alone and totally in the dark 15 miles from the coast with just an inch of fiberglass between you and a bad ending. But Tide Hiker was running well and we were comfortable listening to the audio book "Victoria" as we chugged along.

Sunset arrives early these days

We only came across one 6 footer and it took us completely by surprise. Deidre was watching TV and witnessed all the stuff on my desk fall onto the deck, and the freezer door of the refrig open. I was in the pilot house with a fresh glass of red wine - that tipped over and stained everything on the table, but since the table had baffles nothing reached the floor.  Otherwise the wind picked up a bit but Tide Hiker took it in her stride. (Its was too dark to actually see the waves.)

We both took a turn on the couch for a couple of hours. Deidre woke me as we approached the Brunswick channel - looking like a long airport runway. It took us over an hour to make it into the harbor and drop our anchor in an out of the way corner. We were in bed by 3:15 AM

South Edisto River

Thursday December 1, 2016
32 37 134 N
80 23 893 W

We were underway right at slack. Mike and our new neighbor "Christian" came to drop our lines and see us off. The weather was overcast, cool and windy, but the forecast called for sunny skies as the day progressed.

I was on alert for operational issues, but all systems seemed to come back to life. The diesel fuel was over 12 months old so I watched the vacuum gauges on the fuel system closely. Tide Hiker was back!

The weather forecast is not looking as good as I had hoped so we may be going south on the ICW. So we may continue past Beaufort tomorrow and end up in Georgia. Oh well!

Some sort of fire from our anchorage

An eagle watched our approach

Charleston Marina and Resort

Wednesday November 30, 2016

All things being equal, today is our last day in Charleston. Tide Hiker has been here for 13 months!

The last 3 days since we returned from Cleveland we have been working steadily on getting Tide Hiker ready to move again. We did such a good job getting her ready for Mathew that its taken us almost three days to get everything back in place. The biggest job has been putting all the canvas back in place - and after three weeks of calm the last 3 days have been very windy, which is not conducive to mounting large sheets of canvas and izenglass. I started the engines Monday and they ran OK. I reconnected all the electronics today and everything seemed to start up. Deidre has been shopping twice and filled up the frig and the pantry. Writing this, I just remembered that I had taped over the two generator exhaust pipes and had not removed it - now done. I think we are ready.

Deidre is getting her hair cut at 2:30 PM today so we will do some last minute shopping, pick up Mason, then head over to the "young Tayloys" for dinner.

Slack tide tomorrow morning is 9:15 AM which is perfect. We intend to head south on the ICW and anchor in Toogoodoo Creek or the South Edisto River. Next day to Beauford, SC where we will probably take a mooring ball and go ashore for dinner - or not. Next day - weather permitting - we will catch the tide out of Port Royal sound and shoot out into the Atlantic and do a 150 mile overnight run to St. Augustine, Florida.

Cleveland

Thanksgiving in Cleveland
November 23 to 27, 2016

We drove to Cleveland to celebrate Thanksgiving with Kathy, Adam, Ruby, Indy. This is the busiest travel weekend in the USA, so driving 1,500 miles is no mean feat. (But does not compare with David and Jen and kids who drove from Houston, Texas to Ashville, NC for a Blackman Thanksgiving a few years back! Now that is a drive!)

Ruby and Indy with their grand parents

GM and GP with the kids, Xmas tree harvesting

Charleston, SC

Tuesday November 15, 2016

Our Tuesday was 39 hours long, and most of those hours were used traveling back from Sydney to Charleston. All the flights were good, the two connections in LAX and BWI tedious but efficient, and we arrived in Charleston exactly on time for Kylie to pick us up. Temps were in the 40's and Tide Hiker was cold, so we cranked up our electric blankets and went to bed.

Saturday November 19, 2016

It has taken me until now (4 PM on Saturday) to get to the blog. One reason has been getting access to the internet - the marina wifi system was knocked our by Mathew and is still not repaired. And it took me until yesterday to figure out that the battery in my personal hub had also failed while we were away and so it was not working - most frustrating.

The weather over the last 3 days has been sublime, but a long awaited change arrived this afternoon. Apparently temperatures will be in the 30's tonight. We have been sleeping a lot and generally having trouble getting out of our own way, so not much has been achieved. But today was a new day - we must have caught up on sleep - and so we both got stuck into cleaning the boat and preparing to leave for "places south".

We plan to drive to Cleveland for Thanksgiving - leave Wednesday 23rd and be back on board Sunday 27th. Our aim is to leave Charleston in the first week of December.