Photo shows Jacksonville skyline from the river


View more pics at https://picasaweb.google.com/yacht.quilcene (the river looks blue in my pics but actually it's a brown peaty colour!)

After two nights at Exchange island anchorage we made our way upriver. The tall buildings of Jacksonville reminded us of Canary Wharf as we passed. There's a dock called Jacksonville Landings where you can tie up free for a few nights. It looked good but we will save that pleasure until next year when we return and so continued on, passing commercial, urban, residential and countryside areas.

Two of the bridges were too low for us to pass under so we had to call on the VHF and request a special opening; people were friendly and came out to wave as we passed through.

The St Johns River is unusual compared to other US rivers in that it flows north to its mouth, so we were heading south again which felt odd! Despite being 310 miles long the total elevaton of the river is only about 30ft, and it is up to two miles wide in places, which makes it a very lazy river! Even so there was enough flow to slow us down and it took several hours to reach Green Cove Springs.

The marina isn't quite what we expected, it's a bit basic and there's nothing here in the way of shops, bars, restaurants and not even a coffee shop!!

Still everyone is friendly and a guy offers a shopping run (6 mile round trip) for $12 so we shan't starve! With no distractions we will soon have the boat ready to lift out. We are on a mooring ball as the dock here is an old WW2 navy dock and pretty crumbly! ...although the boatlift looks OK thank goodness! ....and there are hundreds if not thousands of boats stored ashore.

We already took off all the sails - a hot sticky job as there's mostly no wind at all in the mornings and the temperature is around 90F (33C to us - America uses Fahrenheit). In the evenings its cooler and we can see lightening flashing in distant dark clouds but so far we only had one really heavy squall.