Jax or better

We are underway northbound in the Tolomato River, part of the ICW, headed for Jacksonville. We will be in town for a week or so, while Louise flies to California to attend to family matters. Jacksonville is a busier place than Titusville and we should not have the same trouble with a rideshare to the airport.

Monday morning, with a short day to Daytona, we had a lazy morning at Ponce Inlet Harbor waiting for a late-morning Falcon Heavy launch from Canaveral. It was overcast, so we did not have a lot of hope, and ultimately it was for naught, as they scrubbed the launch with just 26 seconds left on the countdown clock. They rescheduled for Wednesday.

I came across this mailbox walking around Porpoise Point. Adding the googly eyes makes the already whimsical manatee even more so.

Lingering for the launch put us against heavy current the whole way to Daytona and we slow-rolled the whole trip to conserve fuel. My log shows it took us 2.2 hours to go just nine nautical miles, for an average speed made good of just 4.1 knots. Under way we learned we had just missed our friends Dori and Bob aboard Liberdade, who left Daytona in the morning on their way south, and whizzed past us while we were still at Ponce. We were tied up at the Halifax River Yacht Club (map) a little before 1pm, likely in the slip Liberdade had vacated in the morning.

I've been having a lot of trouble starting the main engine lately, with the start battery voltage dropping precipitously. At first I attributed this to the fact that we are running the generator a lot less now that we have solar, and the start batteries only charge when the generator is running. But after fully charging them up a couple of times with no relief, I concluded the six-year-old batteries had reached end of life. Daytona was a good place to exchange them, and so as soon as the engine room cooled off a bit, I went down and opened up the start battery compartment.

Off The Hook, where we had dinner with Erin and Chris, as we passed on our way out. Erin had tuna that just came off the boat and was, I hear, the best ever.

My battery load tester immediately confirmed that one of the two batteries was completely done, and the other was marginal. I pulled them both out, hauled them upstairs and onto the dock, and then I strapped them down to our folding "schlepper" with a ratchet strap. Regular readers may recall this is exactly how these batteries arrived six years ago, in New Bedford, MA. Unlike then, when I had to hike the whole way to the store schlepping batteries, this time I walked one block and got on the county bus, which took me all the way to Walmart for a buck.

The Walmart Everstart Maxx marine starting batteries turned out to be exactly identical to the Autocraft/Die-Hard items from Advanced Auto that I traded in; all come from the same Clarios (formerly Johnson Controls) factory. That made them an easy drop-in fit after returning with them on a different bus that gave me an extra two blocks to walk. All things considered, quite easy there in Daytona.

New batteries arrived at the dock via a luggage schlepper. It looks a lot like the pic I took six years ago.

With the yacht club closed on Mondays, we walked a couple of blocks into town for dinner at McK's, an Irish pub with a decent menu and selection of drafts. Afterwards we strolled through the very nice Riverfront Esplanade, which I have to say has been very nicely kept by the private firm that operates it for the city. A little before 9pm we went out on deck to watch the Atlas-Centaur launch for the Amazon Leo Internet constellation, but heavy cloud cover gave us just a one-second glimpse as it passed through a gap. Still impressive.

Tuesday morning we each went for a walk, anticipating being trapped on the boat until Wednesday afternoon, topped up the water tank, and headed out into the ICW. I turned north a little bit ahead of a conga line of smaller but faster cruising boats. That turned into a problem when the Main Street Bridge tender wanted me to wait for all four following vessels to catch up before opening the bridge. We could see quite clearly that none of those boats needed a lift, and none of them was even monitoring the bridge channel. I had to get insistent with him; nothing in the bridge regulations allows tenders to make marine traffic wait for other traffic to catch up, and I did not want to station-keep for a full five minutes.

We could see the rocket for maybe a second but by the time I snapped this pic it was just the exhaust.

In short order we dodged a rusty steel barrel and, later, a 20' long dock piling, both drifting mid-channel, which I reported to the conga line. The piling I also called in to the Coast Guard. In due time the entire conga line passed us, only to have us catch back up at the LB Knox bridge. Meanwhile another boat that caught up to all of us passed us by sounding actual whistle signals, which I had to answer with the whistle. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to do this. It turned out to be Victoria and Kevin in their lovely Burger Set Free; we met them in Charleston last year and we remember him saying he does not like to talk on the radio.

We arrived to the anchorage at Fort Matanzas around 3:30 to find the entire phalanx of boats that had passed us, including Set Free, anchored there. We went all the way down past the park service dock, past all the anchored boats, and dropped the hook just before the end of the Idle Speed zone (map). I grilled lamb chops for dinner, and we had a quiet night, with just the sound of the surf, which is quite loud here.

Looking forward to this some day. We will add it to our list of numbered restaurants that includes Pier 220, Tower 7, Marker 42, and Seasons 52.

We had thought about staying in the anchorage in the morning until the Falcon Heavy launch scheduled for 10:13. But there was again heavy cloud cover to the south, and, more importantly, we had some concern Louise might have to move her flights up a day or two. So instead we weighed anchor before the turn of the tide and continued north, with an option to continue all the way to Pablo Creek Bridge before the end of the day.

At launch time Louise took the helm so I could go up on the boat deck to see if I could catch a glimpse, but it was too overcast and all I could see was a smoke trail after the rocket was out of range. We made the 11am opening at the Bridge of Lions with plenty of current behind us. That same current was against us after we made the left turn at the inlet, and we climbed the hill to our usual anchorage off Vilano Beach (map), where we dropped the hook at 11:30, at least temporarily, to sort out whether we needed to pick up our pace.

They bulldozed the Magic Beach Motel since our last visit, but clearly they salvaged the classic historic sign, which I assume they will put back someplace when they are done.

If we chose to keep going it would be an uphill climb all day. I took another look at the charts and realized we could be all the way to our destination in Jacksonville by the end of today if we got an early start, and we decided there was no sense in bucking the tide all the way to Pablo Creek. We ended up settling in for the night. I wanted to go ashore and walk before dinner, but when I went to launch the dinghy I found the steering completely seized; it had been very stiff at the last stop.

It was fortuitous that I had decided to launch in the early afternoon rather than waiting until dinner time. I spent the next hour or so on deck taking apart the dinghy steering and reaming the rust out of the tilt tube. This is a regular exercise on these outboards, and I am mystified that no one sells a stainless steel replacement tube. I was finally on my way ashore just before 4pm.

These pieces of coquina are ubiquitous in this part of Florida. The perfectly round hole is naturally occuring.

My elation at having nice, one-finger steering was short-lived. On my way to the dinghy dock, which is around the other side of the fishing pier (the remains of an old drawbridge), I inadvertently snagged a barely visible fishing line. Trying to get untangled before I pulled a fishing rod off the pier the current sucked me under the pier (plenty of clearance), and I limped to the dock against a couple of knots. I marched up and gave the fisherman a ten-spot for his trouble, thankful I was not buying him a new rod and reel.

I needed my planned walk to overcome my jitters. I found the new Irish pub, Durty Neli's, now has food, but only Thursday through Sunday. And a new place called Anchor 28 is close to opening in the long-vacant restaurant space at the Holiday Inn Express. The classic Magic Beach Motel has been razed to make room for a new condo complex. And I walked all the way around Porpoise Point after passing the beachfront pavilion where the Casino once stood.

Best shot I could get from my vantage on the dock. I'm about half done removing the fishing line. And I have a few barnacles to deal with, some of which cut me while I was working.

After returning to the dock I lifted the engine out of the water to find perhaps 50' of fishing line wrapped around the prop. I spent the next ten minutes prone on the dock, cutting it away with my pocket knife. It was a struggle to keep the pieces from falling back into the water or blowing away; I kept tucking them in a hole in the gangway until I was finished, then marched them up to the trash.

I picked Louise up back at Vector and we returned ashore for brick oven pizza and draft beer at Surfside. We've given up on 180 Vilano, and this is the alternative. The pizza is decent, although the crust could be a bit crisper, and this particular example had a bit too much garlic on it. We made a quick stop at Publix on the way home, and decked the tender on arrival for an early start this morning. We had to weave our way through some racing sailboats, that were apparently using Vector as their leeward mark.

All the boats in the race were coming about just abeam of us. This was the only pic I got.

This morning, again thinking we might need to be all the way to downtown this evening, we weighed anchor on the flood at 8am and headed upriver. We had a fair tide most of the day, and we shot through the Pablo Creek Bridge at close to ten knots. As I wrap up typing we are anchored in a familiar spot off Blount Island (map), having determined that there is as yet no need to move flights up. We had a good run to the St. Johns but slowed down to three knots for the last 3.5 miles, pushing hard against max ebb on the river.

We'll do the rest of the trip to downtown Jacksonville in the morning, when we have the current behind us. That will give us a full day to settle in before Louise flies to California, and to make sure I am well situated for the duration, especially if she needs to extend her stay. It will also give us a chance to connect again with Erin and Chris, who are in Jacksonville getting their boat settled in at their home marina. You will next hear from me when we are wrapped up here and are again underway northward.