Week of August 11

After spending most of last week acting like a tourist, we had to settle down & get some things done.  We had some minor boat chores to catch up on, so we did those.  We also found a beach on the ocean that we really really liked, so we drove there a couple times.

Another lousy sunset across the ICW at
Marineland Marina

The major effort during the week was visiting about a dozen different marinas, stretching from Orlando to Jacksonville, to try to decide where to spend the coming winter.  We gathered lots of information and developed spreadsheets, so I could do a proper engineering analysis (you can take the man out of engineering, but you can't take the engineering out of the man).  We settled on a marina in Sanford FL at the head of the St Johns River (which flows northbound past Jacksonville into the Atlantic).  The marina is in fresh water, rather than salt water, and should be far enough south to minimize the wintertime cold fronts.  Sanford is about 10 miles northeast of Orlando, so we should be able to find something to do in the big city.  We might even entice our son & family to come visit us while we take our wonderful granddaughter to the area theme parks.  Our boat insurance doesn't restrict us to a specific parallel of latitude during hurricane season, so we plan to beat the snowbirds into marinas by getting to Sanford around October 20.  The boat will spend about 5 months there, but we'll spend 2-3 months in TN during that period, taking care of Sue's mom.

On the beach at Marineland FL are coquina rocks,
composed of tiny marine shells.  When wet, the
rocks are soft & the waves erode them.  When dried,
the rocks become hard enough that the Spanish
settlers made forts out of this rock. 

The other main effort this week was to plan the details of our trip north to Brunswick GA.  We plan to finally leave Marineland Marina on Aug 19 and take 3 days to get to Brunswick.  Because Georgia normally has 6-7' tides (and up to 8' tides this coming week due to a full moon), we have to plan our travels around the numerous shoaling areas.  Couple that with the fact that high tide is around 10 AM each day, and you have some pretty complicated detailed planning.  I've spent many hours planning only a 3-day (125 mile) cruise.  And this only gets us to Brunswick!  If we had planned to continue north to Savannah GA, I'd have many more hours of planning ahead.  Instead, we'll dock the boat at Brunswick for a month while we return to TN for 2 weeks.  When we return, we'll drive by car (our car is already positioned at Brunswick) to visit Savannah, Charleston & other areas, and leave the boat in Brunswick.

The saga continues..........