Saturday, December 2, 2017
33 miles 5.6 Engine Hours
9:31 AM Underway
1:46 PM crossed the Florida - Georgia Line
2:15 PM Docked Port Side to face dock

We didn’t plan on going to Florida today. We planned on St. Marys, GA. I did my route plan and called the dock master at Lang’s Marina in St. Marys. He answered the phone “Hello”. I asked if this was Lang’s Marina and he told me yes but it had been destroyed by Hurricane Mathew. I enquired about anchoring and coming to a dinghy dock. He said all of that was destroyed too. He suggested I skip St. Marys until our return trip in the spring! Maybe by then there will be somewhere to dock. We also heard that Cumberland Island was closed to visitors. We had planned on visiting Cumberland on the return trip. Hope that is ready by then.
So now we set our sights on Fernandina Harbor Marina. We knew Fernandina was destroyed so we didn’t have a good feeling about that. The main face dock at Fernandina is destroyed, But inside there were a few docks and the mooring ball field is operational. We opted for the slip so we could easily go to eat. You know boating is all about eating. We have eaten our way through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. So, Florida, we are here and hungry. I used to say “ I’m not Hungarian, but I’m Hungry. Found out it offended my Hungarian friends reading our blog. So, I don’t say that anymore. Whoops off base here.

About a mile before we reached Fernandina we passed a terrible sight. Storm damaged boats were on a barge and being sent to a crusher. Lots of boats sank during Mathew and Irma. Kind of bad seeing boats being sent to the crusher for death.

We docked almost at dead low tide which was an abnormally lower tide because of the super moon. I still had 8’ below the keel until I got near the inside T dock. The 4’ shallow alarm started beeping but we still had 3’ under our keel. Docked I exclaimed “We are in Florida” Time to switch chart books and the Waterway Cruising Guide to “Florida” I found the cruising guide but not the chart book. I must have left that home. I still like charts as you can get a much larger view of an area. Often with the electronics you can get lost because you cannot see in detail enough of the surrounding area. Anyhow, NOAA has stopped producing paper charts and everyone is electronic charting. I like marking on the chart books dates and times and found it amusing seeing where we were on certain dates and times written on the paper charts as we flip page to page in the chart book.

We walked into the town of Fernaninda to eat of course. We had pizza. We haven’t had pizza on our trip so far. The pizza tasted really good.
The town has many nice restaurants and plenty of shops too. We are going shop hopping Sunday and see what we might add to our boat’s huge storage areas. Of course I’m joking. We still have stuff in bags not put away yet from when we left. It is kind of hard packing for winter and summer clothes. Eventually the winter stuff will be packed up and stored out of sight.
We are staying two days here and getting our boat decorated for Christmas. Sunday night is the super moon. I’ll be trying to get some pictures of that for sure.
Today’s picture is the boat graveyard we passed coming into Fernandina.