Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2020 – With a freshly painted bottom, we were back in the water on Friday the 30th, and had a chance to walk to a local seafood market for some fresh shrimp, scallops and snapper to prepare over the next few days.
Another pretty sunset, and then a nice sunrise to start our next leg south.
We pushed on into South Carolina, hoping to make a series of long days with good weather. We’d decided that this wasn’t going to be the trip for lots of sightseeing trips, so we were up and onward before sunrise almost every day. High winds had us hole up at Tolers Cove Marina for a few days, just short of Charleston, and then on to Beaufort, SC, where we took a mooring ball again, like we did on our way north. Cheap, and easy in/out.
Then it was into Georgia, where we anchored in the Wahoo River; 8 foot tidal swing in the bend of a river, so the current first went one way, then the other, over the course of the night.
As we left, we fell in behind this shrimper heading out at Sapelo Sound.
As we passed St Simons Sound, we could see the progress being made on dismantling the huge car-carrying freighter that had capsized there in September 2019. It’s being sliced into sections, to be loaded on barges and taken for scrap.
Coming down the North River past the city of St. Marys, we turn past the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, the U.S. Atlantic Fleet’s home port for U.S. Navy Fleet Ohio-class ballistic missile nuclear submarines. This time, there’s one in port.
We crossed the border into Florida, staying first on anchor at Fernandina Beach, before continuing on south. We took a 25-mile diversion up the St Johns River to Jacksonville, where we’d use a few days to clean the boat, reprovision, do laundry, and wait out the stormy conditions and high winds forecast into early next week, that may or may not be associated with Tropical Storm Eta.
We actually had a tough time securing a slip, because a lot of other boaters were also changing their plans to head to marinas, or to stay there longer, due to the storms, but were fortunate to get a spot at Lambs Yacht Center. Very interesting place – many covered slips, but unlike many of the other lightly built structures that we’ve seen, these are all made of concrete, and very, very robust. Pilings, walkways, roofs – all concrete. Serious hurricane-proof concrete.
We will post some more pictures later of some of the beautiful yachts docked here.