USA - Florida, Jacksonville

Sailing past Charleston, you can see the vast amount of Ships on AIS, at anchor waiting to go into Charleston to offload. One can easily see the backlog and how it’s affecting the Supply Chain of goods in stores and on order.

We had a fast sail from Beaufort, Georgia to Jacksonville, Florida, arriving at 10pm

I found it a little scary as we closed the entrance to the St Johns River in the pitch dark, the lights of the buoys competing with the lights on land until we were very close. Nicholas kept telling me to focus on the Navigation Chart, and ignore my eyes.

All went well and we motor sailed 3 miles up the river and anchored out of the channel for the night.

Next morning we waited for the Flood Tide to set in and then motored the 20 miles up the St Johns River to Jacksonville, anchoring opposite the Arlington Marina, and close to where the Volvo Agents, Fordham Marine are.

Some sights along the river

At anchor we were astounded at the sheer volume of Dolphins, many of them juveniles that were constantly swimming everywhere

Thursday was a dreary rainy day, all day long.

We had this crane come sit on our aft Solar Panels

Seeing it was raining, Nicholas said he’d attend to some indoor chores, the Kitchen basin tap had become loose. We unloaded and took out the drawers under the sink and he found that the original washer, was plastic and broken. So he had to fashion a new washer and base plate to stop the tap base from turning, and then he couldn’t find his box of O-rings. We searched for 2 hours going thru every maintenance storage locker. Eventually I said he should re-look where the O-rings are supposed to be kept, and empty everything out of that locker, and Yes we found the box. It had fallen to the very back, out of sight. 2 frustrating hours…

By the time Nicholas got the tap re-installed and pipes reconnected the entire day had passed, fixing one little item that should have taken less than an hour - that’s Boat Maintenance !!!