We had identified a marina with a boatyard in South Georgia that had space for us.  Our plan was to take her there, haul her out and keep her on the hard during the 2022 hurricane season and get her refitted before we relaunched her and moved aboard in about a year.  People advised that it would be a two-day trip but we decided to give ourselves three because we had no idea what we were doing.

Before setting out, we decided to spend one day familiarizing ourselves with our new home and actually take her sailing.  Bright and early the next morning, we shoved off, motored out the ICW inlet and into the ocean.  We set the main and genoa up and sailed.  We SAILED!!  It was awesome!  We can do this!  We experimented with different points of sail, relaxed a little after all the stress of getting to this point, and enjoyed ourselves.  We also spent about 2 hours running MOB drills because, well, you can’t be too careful.  And because Kim has a safety thing-go figure.

We managed to return to the marina, through a rain storm, without incident except having to retrieve a fender we dropped overboard.  We decided we were ready for Leg One:  Ponce Inlet to Saint Augustine.

We were at the fuel dock at 6 AM the next morning.  We fueled up and away we went.  Back out on the ocean, we discovered that there was no wind.  PredictWind said there SHOULD be wind, but…nope.  So we motored.  By about noon the wind began to pick up and we set the sails and shut down the motor.  As the afternoon went on, the wind steadily filled in and we were moving right along.  I even set the staysail, giving us an extra half knot.  PIECE. OF. CAKE!

If something seems to be too good to be true…

As we approached Saint Augustine in the early evening, a squall line set up over land and it hit us as we approached the drawbridge to get to our marina.

That was NOT good.  Sheets of rain.  High winds.  Thunder.  Lightning all around us.  It was scary.  Did I mention the lightning? REALLY scary.  I didn’t want to try the drawbridge in that weather, because I had read that the currents there can be really strong.  So we circled around in the middle of a thunderstorm until it passed.  A boat passed us yelling:  “Your electric line is in the water!!”  Another boat passed us yelling:  “The bridge operator is trying to call you!!”  This was going well.

We called up the bridge operator on the VHF.  He was clearly irritated with us, wanting to know our intentions.  At that point, just staying alive seemed like a worthy goal.  We fished the electric line out of the water (Note to self:  sailing on the Atlantic Ocean is different that sailing on Lake Erie).  Once the storm passed, we went under the bridge and found the marina-our home for the night.  We fueled up, docked, and cried. Okay, full disclosure, it was me, actually.  We had no shore power since our cord was soaked and so no A/C.  To be honest, I was thinking we had made a huge mistake.  This was NOT for us.  But, we couldn’t just abandon the boat in St. Augustine, so we had to keep going.  We went to bed and slept as best we could in the heat so we could face another day.

St. Augustine, Florida-AFTER the storm