We ended up having to spend two nights in Fernandina Beach. It was so windy yesterday that we didn’t want to go anywhere if we didn’t have to. Not windy enough for us to miss breakfast ashore though. We knew we really liked the restaurant last year when we came through, right before Christmas. So we braved the high winds and took the dinghy across the channel and into the marina and walked to the restaurant. Of course it wasn’t as wonderful as we had remembered, but it was still good. On the way back to our dinghy Bill got the picture above. The bird was taking shelter from the wind in someone’s dinghy.

We spent the day taking care of some phone calls and other business. Things are starting to break. We are having some issues with our watermaker, and the radar is having a problem too. Bill called the radar manufacture and they needed the display shipped back to them. Soon we will be leaving the country so shipping anything will be very difficult, we need to take care of this now. We also have a couple of opportunities for addresses to ship to in the next few weeks so we have to take advantage of that too. So, we had to ship the radar yesterday to make the timing work out. Luckily the shipping store was not far from the dock and it was open until 9:00pm. The wind started dying down a bit after dark so we went back across the channel in the dark and got the radar shipped out.

Today we motored to Jacksonville, actually where the ICW meets the St. Johns River about 10 miles from the city. There was a lot of shallow water to watch out for but we didn’t have any issues. Last year, when we stopped to visit our friends in Jacksonville, we stayed at a marina on the ICW. This year the marina is no longer willing to give space to transient boats for one or two nights. There are not a lot of places along the ICW in Jacksonville to put a boat. If you anchor there isn’t even a good place to put your dinghy. We were lucky to find space at a free dock inside a state park. There are two big power boats here and another sailboat. We will spend the night at our friends’ house and hope Moonraker has a good night on the dock.