Happy Holidays to All

We jumped from St. Augustine to Daytona Beach for another two nights. Grant Hospital gave me a bundle of Macy's gift certificates as a retirement gift and Daytona has a mall with a Macy's store.

We didn't get any photos of Daytona because of rain and overcast skies. We did our shopping. Mandy talked to Santa between his visits with children and loved the Christmas decorations throughout the mall. After that, the camera broke so we will have no photos until we get a new camera.

Our dock neighbor, John, joined us after dinner on Friday night for a few holiday libations. John is a singlehander and showed me a few unknown anchorages in the area.

We anchored the following night in Mosquito Lagoon, a body of water behind the barrier islands that carry highway A1A to Miami and beyond. It's the biggest anchorage we have ever used, measuring about 3 miles wide by 10 miles long.

We arrived in Harbortown Marina on Merritt Island on Sunday, December 20. We are there still and are spending Christmas with our friends, Jim and Vicki Oneal who live on their boat here.

They have been hauling us around to shop, drink, and dine at all of the best local places. We had the best ever Jalapeno Poppers, the funkiest tacos, and more. They drove us to a Christmas light display similar to Ogelby in West Va but better. We went through twice.

Last night, we all went to hear a musician play his steel drums with recorded backup at the marina bar. He even gave Mandy a lesson.

Jim and Vicki are visiting family today but will return soon. We have a turkey breast, stuffing, potatoes, and gravy on the menu for tomorrow.

I have the dinghy set up to take Mandy for a row in the canal next to the marina to hunt for Manatee. Merry Christmas!! I hope to have a new camera soon so we can resume posting photos.

St Augustine

We left Brunswick on Thursday, December 10th in a punishing 45 degree North wind. We anchored next to Amelia City on Amelia Island Thursday night. The winds reached near gale force that night and even though I had two anchors down, I slept fitfully because of the chorus of noises created by the wind as it screamed through the rigging of the boat. On Friday, we again sailed downwind through rain on a cold North wind. The temperature never climbed much above 50 degrees.

I can hear the folks back home say "wah" to sailing in temperatures above the freezing mark but I can't think of anyone except my brother-in-law, Erich, who actually spends a day exposed to the cold winds and who knows how the wind and rain can cut through the skin like a sword.

On Saturday we sailed into St Augustine into a slip at the municipal marina next to the Bridge of Lions. The rain continued until just after dark, ending just in time for the Christmas parade of boats. A couple dozen boaters had decorated their craft with hundreds of lights. They motored a circle in the basin North of the bridge. Some were so laden with lights that the helmsman must have had difficulty seeing outside of the boat to navigate having been blinded with Christmas lights.

Saturday night we discovered a Cuban restaurant that featured live Cuban music. The lead singer played a standard electric guitar and his percussionist surrounded himself with a circle of drums as we might have seen in the Xavier Cougat orchestra. But we were most fascinated with the accompaniment of the man playing a 10 string guitar. He produced a never ending series of single notes to compliment the singing.

On Sunday we walked the town. We saw the oldest house and ancient churches. We found a military hospital museum that displayed surgical instruments from the civil war era and the purveyor allowed me to ring the death bell--the bell that the doctors used to call the reverend to come perform final prayers for a dying soldier. We visited the University of St Augustine which was originally a hotel built by Henry Flagler who also built the railroad to Key West. The pictures above are mostly of that building and the courtyard.

Sunday night, Rich and Judy Bendick met us for dinner (thanks again for picking up the tab). Rich has been my friend since 1972. He and Judy moved to the Jacksonville area after he retired a few years ago so I don't see as much of them as I used to.

On Monday we cast off lines at noon and ran a short 13 mile sail to the Matanzas River where the old Spanish fort still stands. I'll post a picture of it in my next blog entry.

A Visit to St Simon Island

We left Brunswick last Thursday, December 10 but not before we took our rental car for a visit to St Simon Island.

Mandy had read most of the Eugenia Price novels that depicted life on the island years ago. She wanted to visit the places that she had read about in the Price novels and we both wanted to spend a night off the boat in a real hotel.

We chose a hotel that resembled the old Florida of Spanish influence. It was a short walk to all of the shops and restaurants of the "Old Town" area as well as the lighthouse and the lighthouse keeper's home which we visited the following morning.

We also visited the Christ Episcopal Church and graveyard. Ms. Price is buried somewhere in that cemetery but her grave is difficult to locate.

I drove to Dalonegha Georgia for the weekend of December 5th to visit my son, Matt, his wife, Janet, and my grandkids, Julia and Taylor. We decorated his truck for the town Christmas parade. I only meant to help decorate then watch the parade from the street but when I stepped inside the truck to warm my hands the parade began and I was suddenly in it. Matt handed me a Santa hat and I found myself waiving to the hundreds of children along the street. "Santa has a braided ponytail instead of a beard" the children must have thought.

I returned Monday to Brunswick. Mandy and I drove to Jekyll Island that night to see the impressive Christmas lights. We had a seafood boil dinner at a small shack built out on the end of a pier overlooking the ICW. We would see the same place from the water the next day as we motored further south seeking warmer weather.

Shrimp, Grackles, and Dogs, Oh My

Here in Brunswick, we often awake in the wee hours of the night to hear a disturbing sound. Some nights, I swear that I hear a crackling fire burning in the main cabin. Or perhaps I am hearing Mandy, up in the middle of the night, wrapping Christmas gifts with stiff paper. Mandy says she awakes to hear what she thinks might be me trimming my fingernails. The crackling, snapping, crinkling sounds are shrimp. Locals tell me that they gather along the hull of the boat and snap their tails against the marine growth that collects on the surfaces below the waterline to dislodge it for a quick grassy snack. It's not a loud sound but unfamiliar enough to awaken us even though we are undisturbed by the sounds of trains that run throughout the night on the tracks that adjoin the marina.

Another unfamiliar sound was the invasion of a plague of grackles. That's what a flock of grackles are properly called; a plague. I can see why. The air was still as I sanded the varnish on Foxglove in preparation for another coat when they suddenly arrived screaming and squawking--thousands of them--just like in the Hitchcock movie, "The Birds". In less than a minute they covered every elevated perch in the marina. Every boat's masthead, shroud, forestay, backstay, and spreader, was covered with a thick coating of black, iridescent, grackles. They sat talking and squawking their peculiar song. "UH-oh", a grackle at the head of a nearby mast warned me, over and over. "OH YES" I squawked back at him, over and over.

Grackles have also have a peculiar custom to match their peculiar song. They 'ant' themselves; that is, they capture and cover their feathers with insect juices to serve a variety of functions such as an insecticide and a bactericide. This area of Georgia has no shortage of insects and every evening at dusk, millions of bugs of all types stream from the salt marshes in search of people like Mandy. Mandy is a bug favorite, tasty in every way. As long as she is nearby, I never get stung, bitten, or chased. They all want Mandy's exquisite interstitial fluids--the best and tastiest known to all of bugdom. The grackles were there for a few days to save her from some of the bugs by consuming a large portion of the nightly swarm.

We also have the usual boat yard dogs to greet us wherever we go and, as boat yard dogs often do, greet us in unusual places. Mandy had just entered the marina shower one morning and prepared to step into the shower when Jackson, an Apple Headed Chihuahua, scampered under the doorway and became infatuated with Mandy's toes; so infatuated that Jackson wouldn't stop licking them. Jackson is the pet of one of the marina dockhands and has free run of the place as boat yard dogs always do. I have story about a boatyard dog named Rusty. I'll tell it to you sometime.