St. Augustine to Daytona Beach, FL

Today:    57 miles, 7.0 hours, ICW St. M 830

Total:     1052.2 miles, 142.0 hours

     Woke at 1:30 this morning to the howling winds.  Current conditions reported winds N at 29 mph with gust to 42 mph! Though it had stopped for a while, the rain has also returned.  I thought about the wisdom of traveling tomorrow, but decided to sleep on it.  Instead, Pete woke me around 5:30 and told me to turn off my alarm.  We aren’t going anywhere in this mess.  We will re-evaluate later once we get up.

    So… we got up around 8 and it appeared as if the winds might finally be lessening.  The rain promised to be spotty for the next few hours.  After breakfast, we decided it was good to go.

     As we passed the St. Augustine Inlet, you could see the angry waves pounding the inlet.  Thankfully, the ICW was pretty calm and the North wind helped speed us south.  The only hiccup was waiting for the 10:30 opening of the Lyons Bridge.  With the strong current, Pete had to work to keep PEKABU a safe distance from the bridge.  He had the engine in full reverse keeping us in place.  Once through the bridge, we had the current and the wind aiding us in reaching 8.9 mph for most of the morning.

     Monitoring 09 for the bridge openings, we had a good chuckle when the Crescent Bridge female operator replied to an inquiry, “when are your openings?” with “I am on request.”

     By noon, the rains had stopped, and the winds were breezes.  Pete was able to transfer diesel from one of the onboard fuel cans.  Hopefully, the other two will be transferred into the tank by the time we get to Riviera Beach.

     Just north of New Smyrna we began seeing lots of dolphins. Just south of it we saw a cormorant chasing another cormorant, who had an eel hanging from its mouth. It finally attempted to swallow the eel and we could see the huge lump in its throat. During the rest of the day, we probably saw more than 100 different dolphins, but only saw about 8 manatees.

     I had to do some laundry tonight, but by the time we arrived at Halifax Marina, topped off fuel, did the pump out, got settled in our slip and straightened up the boat, it was dinner time.  Pete had problems with the gate key so after dinner, it was easy to say, “I’ll do it tomorrow!” 

     Tomorrow will be another full day, so it will be another early bedtime with an early start in the morning.
      No photos today!  I even checked all the photos again.

~~~ /) ~~ K & P