A mix of family and cruising updates

We are underway northbound out of Florida, headed toward St. Simons Island, Georgia. That will have us north of the "hurricane box" with most of the month left to spare. I have a lot to update today, as I was never able to squeeze out an update before we flew to Colorado -- there was just too much to get done. It has been a full two weeks since my last post.

Last night's fireworks at the Fernandina Shrimp Festival.

The remainder of our cruise on Saturday was uneventful, even with the weekend traffic, and we arrived to our usual anchorage at the Matanzas Inlet right at 5pm. The area seaward of the fort was still busy with the weekend crowd, so we dropped the hook just on the landward side (map) but still inside the no wake zone. By sunset all the day trippers had left and we had the entire anchorage mostly to ourselves. We had a nice dinner of grilled chicken on board.

Sunday morning we weighed with the tide for St. Augustine, which was pretty busy on a pleasant Sunday, We continued to our usual spot north of the bridge in Vilano Beach (map). That made it a short day, but the next stop at the St. Johns would have been a stretch, and we still did not have an answer on the funeral timing. Besides, I had errands to run.

Vector as seen from the Vilano pier. That's as close as we can anchor due to a cable area.

Chief among those errands was to run to Ace Hardware for a tube of bathroom caulk, as I had discovered the night before that the old caulking had separated enough to allow water to run down the walls past the shower pan. The other was a simple grocery run to the nearby Publix to restock the beer and a few other items. It turned out I could do neither of those things, because both Ace and Publix were closed for Easter.

This whimsical bird on the Vilano pier always makes me smile.

We ended up with a quiet afternoon aboard, wherein I polished up both our dress shoes for the service, and changed the charcoal in the filter canister for the waste vent. Fortunately several of the restaurants in Vilano were open even on the holiday, and we tendered ashore for dinner at 180 Vilano, one of our old standbys, with decent food and one of my favorite brown ales on tap. After dinner we took a short stroll around town.

I can stop searching now. Peacock for scale.

Monday morning I jumped in the tender to run the errands denied me on Sunday. I landed on the mainland side at the boat ramp, where I stirred the mud crossing the bar in just 18" of water at low tide. It's a mile walk to the Ace, where I picked up the caulk and a quart of denatured alcohol, which we've learned will remove mild rust stains from our paint. I have since re-caulked the shower.

It's basically an enormous but quite fabulous chicken.

When I returned to the dock I ran into a Great Loop celebrity, Peter Frank, who is doing the Great Loop in a canoe, clockwise. Most loopers, ourselves included, go counterclockwise, owing to the five knots or so of current on the unavoidable stretch of the Mississippi, so in addition to having to paddle the whole 6,000 miles, he's going the hard way. To borrow a phrase, backwards in heels. I've interacted with him online, in particular regarding stops in New York, and we had a nice chat for a few minutes before we both shoved off.

Peter Frank and the canoe he is paddling around the Great Loop.

After leaving the boat ramp I crossed the river to the Vilano pier and hoofed it to Publix. They did not have any beer we wanted, but the had the rest of our list. On my way back to the tender I buttonholed one of the workers at what had appeared to us to be a new restaurant under construction, and he told me it would be an Irish pub, with a couple of B&B units in the back. I expect it will be open the next time we pass through.

We left this tour boat, Atlantic Fury, behind in Key West. The season is winding down there and she's moved to Vilano for a time. Many of the Key West tour boats spend the summer in New England.

I returned to Vector just in time for a quick lunch before weighing with the tide for the run to the St. Johns. Timing was such that we hit the Pablo Creek Bridge, with its notorious currents, with over a full knot against us, but there was no way to avoid that and still have a daylight arrival. As we passed Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach, we got a phone call from our friends Charles and Vicki, who were having dinner at the Dockside Seafood Restaurant there and saw us go by. It was great to hear from them; had we known ahead of time we might have figured a way to get ashore there and join them.

Vector underway in Jacksonville Beach. Photo: Charles Cornett

We caught the last of the fair tide at the St. Johns to make our familiar anchorage between Blount and Little Marsh islands (map). By this time we had received word that the funeral would be Monday, eliminating Savannah as a departure option, and we knew we would be continuing up the St. Johns in the morning. We tendered ashore for dinner at Palms Fish Camp, followed by a brief stroll over the bridge. We passed a couple of absolute neophyte fishermen on the bridge, who had caught a flounder but did not know what it was or whether it was edible. Louise did her best to answer their questions, even though neither of us fishes.

Palms Fish Camp. That's actually a public dock.

I spent the entire evening online combing through flight options, hotels, and rental cars to reserve all three. We ended up with flights to Denver, as there are no non-stop options to Colorado Springs, leaving Saturday and returning Tuesday. I booked a slip at the Florida Yacht Club starting Friday, to give us time to settle in, get the boat squared away, and have time to get ready. That would give us three nights until our arrival.

It was past 2pm before the tide became favorable on the St. Johns Tuesday, so I spent the morning refurbishing my noise-cancelling headphones, which were starting to shed bits of protein leather everywhere and were really too ratty to take on the plane as-is. I also fine-tuned the hotel reservations and car rental timing.

The bread pudding at Palms was enormous. Hand for scale, and two bites are already missing.

We weighed anchor before 2:30, and in hindsight we should have waited another half hour, because the tide was not as fair as I'd hoped. But we had a pleasant couple of hours cruising upriver to Jacksonville. Our plan was to dock for the night at the east face dock in Metropolitan Park, which had plenty of room when we arrived. However we could see lots of activity in the park as we pulled up, and that turned out to be the setup for the upcoming Jacksonville Boat Show. We did not want to be in the middle of that so we continued on.

Vector anchored off Little Marsh Island.

A small part of the face dock at the Landings, east of the Main Street Bridge, is again open, but we opted to continue to our usual anchorage between the bridges, in front of the Baptist medical center (map), or as we like to call it, the suspicious boat anchorage. We often have it to ourselves, but on this occasion there were already three boats here. We tendered ashore at the newly restored Friendship Fountain in Southbank and walked to Sake House for dinner on their patio.

This brand new pirate-ship-theme playground is at the newly renovated Friendship Fountain and it's already hugely popular.

Knowing we were staying put for a couple of days, Wednesday morning I finally tackled the slow leak in the stabilizer system. Hydraulic fluid had been seeping out somewhere in the back of the fluid conditioner unit for a few weeks, and I had already spent hours looking for it, finally determining it was either a blanking plug on the very back of the unit, or the centering solenoid on the left side. In either case the stabilizers would be unusable for the duration of the repair, so we need to be stationary and with time on my hands.

The first order of business was to pin the fins. That process requires the system to be working, and they needed to be pinned in case the repair went sideways and we'd have to run without benefit of stabilization. In hindsight I should have pinned them when we arrived to the anchorage, but it wasn't topmost on my mind, so I had to fire up the main engine for ten minutes while I got it done.

Jury-rigged support for the fluid conditioner. I knew I'd need that 1' section of PVC pipe some day.

The conditioner unit weighs 80 lbs dry, and has about a gallon and a half of hydraulic fluid in it, so a little over 90 lbs total. It's mounted on an aluminum diamond-plate backboard with studs and nuts. I had to jury-rig overhead support with a couple of 4' poplar 1x4's I had lying around, and a pair of 3/8 poly ropes with a cinch hitch. I used a 1' section of schedule 80 PVC pipe, also lying around, to allow the rope to slide freely over the boards for the hitch. For good measure I put my bottle jack under the reservoir, atop a pair of 5-gallon oil pails.

Bottle jack let me unweight the studs for removal.

Fortunately I only needed to fully remove two of the nuts, and loosen the other two, to tilt it away from the backboard and get behind it. Using my phone and a mirror, I found a leaking boss o-ring plug to be the culprit. After removing the plug I found the ~20-year-old o-ring solidified into hard plastic, with a wedge-shaped cross-section. A section of it broke away completely when I removed it.

I could just get my phone (and a tool) behind it with the mount at the end of the studs.

I had purchased an assortment of fresh O-rings for this project and had the right size on hand. Replacing the plug fixed it right up, test-running the system before getting the nuts back on the studs. We've now put more than a dozen hours on it with no leaks. I do wonder just how many other 20year old O-rings are ready to start leaking. I had everything cleaned up and the fins unpinned by the end of the day. We tendered ashore to Anejo Cocina in Brooklyn for fajitas and a pitcher of Modelo Negra.

This photo taken with a mirror shows a better view of the leaking plug.

Louise and I both ordered new "personal item" size suitcases for the trip, and hers was delivered to the Amazon locker at the transit center on Wednesday (mine never arrived, which is a story unto itself). So Thursday morning we decided to go retrieve it together, making use of the Skyway, since it is otherwise a long walk from the closest dock. This quickly turned into a train wreck, if you will pardon the pun, of the highest order.

We landed at the fountain dock on the south bank and walked to the San Marco station, only to find it closed with a sign saying all the Southbank stations were closed and to, instead, take a shuttle bus to the Central station on the north side of the river. Not wanting to wait twice for shuttle buses, we got back in the tender and went over to the landings dock on the north side, a short walk to the Central station.

Jax skyline. New logo on the CSX building is actually a locomotive. The colored lights on the Actosta bridge are off for some reason.

This, too, we found closed, with yet a different sign saying the whole system was down. Sheesh -- couldn't they have put that sign on the Southbank stations? While we were standing there, one of the downtown Ambassadors who is normally at the Central station to direct the lost came over to say they had just closed it that morning and it had been news to him, too. He'd been timing the shuttles and advised us we'd be better off taking the city bus instead.

By the time we arrived at the nearest bus stop, we realized the transit center was just ten minutes further and we ended up walking the whole way, which was pretty much the limit of Louise's feet. We did take the bus the other direction, all the way back to the landings, after first loading the transit app to pay the fares. I guess it was an adventure, but it took all morning.

We caught a SpaceX launch while we were anchored. That orange spot center-frame, still lower than most of the buildings, is the rocket. 

We spent the afternoon rifling through closets picking out clothes for the funeral, in case either of us might come up short and need a quick excursion to the store. Also, we knew some of it would need a trip through the wash, and we wanted to have everything ready to pack. We tendered ashore to the Southbank Water Taxi dock and walked to Ruths Chris for dinner, where they have a little-known and quite reasonable food menu in the bar during happy hour.

We need high tide to get into the yacht club, and we weighed anchor Friday morning for a high-tide arrival at 10:15. When I had booked the slip, Carter the dockmaster told me it was a squeeze because they were having the grand opening party for the new pool and deck, and we arrived to find the docks busier than we've ever seen (but still not full). Even at high tide, we plowed the mud backing into the slip (map).

We passed this Chesapeake Bay buyboat, possibly now a yacht, on our way upriver to the club.

After we got everything squared away, I went into the club to check on my own Amazon packages, pick up our mail, and make a reservation for dinner. That's when I learned that the grand opening party was so big that the club was not serving any of its normal dinner options in the bar or dining room. They still had room at the event, though, so I signed up for two tickets for the very reasonable buffet.

We draw 6' but the water is only 5.3' deep. Our keel is in the mud.

My Amazon order of fresh earpads for my headphones arrived, allowing me to finish that project, but my suitcase disappeared into the Amazon abyss. I would ultimately spend a half hour on their chat explaining that when it arrived after we left the dock, I would have no way to return it. I dug out another bag, and by dinner time we had everything ready to pack.

We enjoyed attending the big grand opening shindig. It's a very nice pool and patio area, complete with outdoor bar area, and the party was well attended. We enjoyed the buffet, but ended up sitting by ourselves and did not really meet any members. They had a live band, which we could hear from the boat, but they did not go to late and it was mostly pleasant.

Saturday morning I had a last-minute pilgrimage on the e-bike to the Winn-Dixie for some fragrance-free toiletries, as one of the nieces has a severe fragrance allergy. I had hoped to try out the new pool, but between the shopping trip and packing there was not enough time before our Lyft to the airport. We breezed through the pre-check line and settled in at Shula's, near the gate, for a beer before boarding. We picked up subs from Angie's, also near the gate, to eat for dinner on the flight. We had paid for upgraded economy seats and we lucked out, with each of our window seats having an empty center seat adjacent.

The new pool and patio on official opening day.

Somewhere before boarding we heard an announcement that the in-flight Internet access would be unavailable on the flight, and sure enough, when I tried it, normally free for me with T-Mobile, it was not working. You could get the on-board entertainment, which comes from a server on the aircraft, but that was it. So we were essentially incommunicado during the flight, just like the old days.

And so it was that as soon as we were on the ground, Louise's phone lit up with a surfeit of text messages. Her dad, also in town for the funeral, had taken a bad fall in his hotel shower and was being admitted to the hospital. We spent the whole time between the gate and the Hertz building ruminating about whether we needed to bypass our Denver hotel near the airport and drive directly to the hospital in Colorado Springs, and booking another room there instead.

By the time we were driving out of the airport, cooler heads had prevailed, and given that his wife was with him, and it would be near midnight on our body clocks and close to the end of visiting hours when we arrived, we instead proceeded to our original hotel a short distance from the Denver airport. Not before stopping at 7-11 for some much needed beer.

We had a little bit of a Rocky Mountain view from our Denver airport hotel.

My plans for a leisurely morning at the hotel before the drive to Colorado Springs were out the window, and we were up before dawn, wolfing down the free breakfast when it opened at 6, so we could check out and head directly to the hospital. As she was headed to the breakfast table, coffee in hand, Louise dropped her phone on the tiled floor, shattering the screen into, to borrow a phrase, many fragments, some large, some small. The phone mostly still worked, but she could barely touch the screen without getting a glass shard in her finger.

Normally on a short trip like this we would just set it aside and get by with my phone, but now there were dozens of messages concerning her family that barely involved me, and there was a real possibility I'd be heading home without her, and she'd need a usable phone. When we got back to the room I spent some time finding a suitable replacement on Amazon and ordered it on one-day delivery to a locker in Colorado Springs.

That handled, we checked out and proceeded directly to the hospital, a drive of about an hour and a half. Things were not nearly as bad as we feared, and he was in good spirits and doing fairly well. We left the hospital in time to make our commitment for a family luncheon and get-together at 11, about 40 minutes away. While the circumstances were sad, we were glad to meet all our great-nieces and nephews and it was good to spend time with our nieces, nephews, and my brother- and sister-in-law as well as her siblings.

The view from our Colorado Springs hotel. The Hilton app lets me choose a room and I selected the side with the view.

I rooted around the house where some family were staying looking for packing tape, but what I found instead was Saran Wrap and Scotch Tape, and with those I was able to fashion a screen protector so Louise could use her phone until we got her set up with a new one. After a nice visit we drove across town to check into our hotel.

We had enough time for a much-needed short nap before we drove off in another direction to the church, where we met a much larger contingent of family, our niece's in-laws, and a lot of close friends, over coffee and dessert. Any semblance of normalcy in our caloric intake or dining schedules was, by this time, long gone, and the hotel breakfast, 11am lunch, and 6pm dessert was more than enough for the day.

Monday morning we had breakfast at the hotel before driving to the graveside service. These are never easy; there is a finality to it that can not be denied, and it was very emotional for all of us. Fittingly, it was a cold morning, and we shivered through part of it. Afterward we had a full hour before the church service, and some of us met for coffee in a nearby coffee shop while we waited. When we went to pay the check there wasn't one; some kind soul who knew the family had picked it up.

Early arrivals before the service.

The service was packed. Our niece was well-known and well-loved in her community and her church. The service was a little over an hour and was live-streamed, so my father-in-law got to see it in his hospital room. A lunch reception followed, after which we made our way back to the hotel to rest after a very emotional few hours. I even managed a few minutes in the hot tub.

Although we had nothing else on our schedule, an impromptu family dinner began to emerge over text messaging, and by dinner time 14 of us were converging on the Black Bear Diner, not far from the hospital, with the thought that some would go for a visit afterward. While we were at dinner we got the notification that the new phone had been delivered to the Amazon Locker.

Family dinner.

We had intended to go to the hospital after dinner, but with at least four other family members going, and being dog-tired and still working on Eastern Time, we waved off and instead headed back to the hotel by way of the locker. We instead went directly to the hospital Tuesday morning after a quick breakfast and checking out of the hotel. Things were improving, and he had been moved to a regular room from the progressive care ward.

We wrapped up the family visit with lunch at our niece's house. Here we added the final family member to our tally for the trip, Sterling, the bernedoodle. They had adopted this dog just before her diagnosis, and I know Sterling was a great comfort to her through her illness. She is a sweet dog who warmed right up to us after the obligatory bark at the unknown arrivals.

Sterling, a good dog.

Right up to lunch time it had been in question whether Louise would be flying home with me, or would need to stay to support her father and step-mother. Over lunch it was decided that her brother and sister-in-law, who had driven down from Canada, would stay a few extra days, with the option for Louise to fly back at a later date if the need arises. We're keeping the list of accessible airports in mind as we continue north along the coast.

We drove directly to the airport by way of a cheap gas station, dropped off the car, and were through TSA over two hours before our flight. We had to hunt a bit for a bench where Louise could stretch out; she crashed hard and slept for nearly an hour while I struggled to catch up on email and messages after three days of not being able to pay attention.

Dolphins in our Jacksonville anchorage.

We had scored first class seats for the return trip and had a decent dinner on the plane. The WiFi was working on this flight, but nary a message came in, thankfully. By the time Uber was dropping us off at the yacht club it was well past midnight. That's when we  discovered that, in our absence, workmen had erected more fencing to remove the old patio and gates that were previously unlocked were now locked, and we did not have the gate code. Rather than roust the dockmaster at nearly 1am, we managed to climb through part of the fence to get back to the boat and our own comfortable bed.

We slept in on Wednesday morning, trying to recover from the jet lag. We had just enough milk for our morning coffee, after which I had to run to Winn-Dixie on the e-bike for more milk and a few other items. High tide was at 2pm, and so after lunch I finally got in a brief swim in the nice new pool. It was lovely, but not as warm as I like; that will be a non-issue shortly in the brutal heat of Florida summer.

More of last night's fireworks. I have dozens of photos.

We dropped lines at high tide and made our way out into the river, heading right back where we left from on Friday at the suspicious boat anchorage (map). We needed another night to recover and get a few things done before heading back downriver.

One of those things to be done was to set up Louise's new phone and transfer everything. I had been prepared to do that in Colorado if she was going to stay, but once that decision passed, it made no sense to be monkeying with phones right before she'd need it to board the flight. I had plugged it in to charge first thing in the morning, and after we set the hook I got to work.

Vector at anchor as seen from the Skyway as it crosses the Acosta Bridge.

I did not get far. I had ordered an unlocked model, brand new in box, and while it was in generic packaging I immediately got an error while trying to activate Android, telling me to call a certain number. That number turned out to be Verizon, so what was supposed to be an unlocked all-carrier phone turned out to be a Verizon model. Louise does have Verizon, but we never take the carrier-specific model.

That phone went right back to Amazon, sadly no longer new-in-box, and I hunted around for another one that could be delivered overnight. Jacksonville was the last Amazon locker location we will see for a while. That committed us to another night in Jacksonville, and Louise also ordered some meds to the only Walgreens accessible from the docks, buried in the bowels of the Baptist Hospital. We found the Post Street dock to be reopened and we had dinner at relatively new Rodrigos Pizza in the Five Points neighborhood, ending with ice cream from a joint just called Waffle Cone.

Old Hickory himself. Behind him on the site of the Landings is a new riverfront park under construction.

Thursday as soon as the Amazon notice arrived I set out on whirlwind excursion on the Skyway, once again operational. I tendered ashore at the Landings, locked up the dink, and walked to the UPS Store to drop off the incorrect phone, by way of a stop at the Chase branch to take care of some account business. The Skyway entrance is right next to UPS and it was a short ride to the transit center for the new phone at the Amazon locker. A change of trains took me across the river to Baptist Hospital with its Walgreens that is little more than a pharmacist counter.

At dinner time we were hoping to head back to Five Points for either the biergarten or the Mediterranean place, but the river proved far too choppy south of the I-95 bridge, and we turned around and headed to Brooklyn instead. We ended up back at Anejo Cocina for another pitcher of Modelo Negra to close out our Jacksonville stop.

This ocean-going Ro-Ro barge is being loaded for Puerto Rico.

Yesterday morning we got an early start to have a fair tide all the way downriver and into Sisters Creek. There was a bit of a glitch as the anchor came up with the hammer-lock hockled, but it was able to bash its way over the roller and through the hawsepipe so we could get underway; I freed it later on our way downriver.

The anchor chain somehow jammed on the hammer-lock like this. I had to pry it apart.

As we were turning off the St. Johns into Sisters Creek, our friends Amy and David aboard Selah Way hailed us on the radio; they had spotted us as they were entering the river from the other side of the ICW. They passed us under way and we caught up with them later at the fuel dock.

Vector underway north of Cumberland Island. Photo: Amy Deutl

The early start and fair tide let us get all the way to Fernandina Beach by mid-afternoon, in plenty of time to catch the Port Consolidated Fuel Dock before they closed for the weekend. Fuel here is just $2.65 a gallon for cash or check, with no tax if the fuel is leaving Florida. We had to wait a little over an hour for our turn, after a shrimp boat, and spent another hour at the dock putting in a full 1,100 gallons, which should take us all the way to New England and then some.

While we were fueling this "pirate ship" came in on its way to the shrimp festival.

After bunkering we headed straight for the anchorage (map) and tendered ashore, running right smack into opening ceremonies of the 60th annual Isle of Eight Flags Shrimp Festival, the biggest thing that happens each year in Fernandina Beach. While fresh shrimp from a stand has a certain appeal, we wanted a sit-down meal with a draft beer, and we made our way to Scully's Irish Pub while it was still uncrowded. We've done all the must-see restaurants in Fernandina, and wanted something different and less crowded. This one was fine, but not worth a repeat.

Contestants in the Miss Shrimp Festival pageant lined up for the stage.

After dinner we strolled downtown, the entirety of which had been closed to traffic for the festival, with center street and two blocks either side of it filled with vendor stalls. I somehow neglected to snap an overview shot, but I caught Louise with the mascot shrimp. We heard the music from the main stage well into the night out in the anchorage. Fortunately it was mostly our era. We got to take in the fireworks show right from our deck.

Louise tangles with the festival mascot.

As large and vibrant as the festival was, the couple of hours we spent was plenty, and we did not feel the need to spend another day. Nothing they are selling at any of those booths is something we need aboard Vector. We got underway this morning with the tide, arriving at the St. Marys Inlet just as the flood started.

This pirate-ship tour boat, en route from its winter cruising grounds in Marco Island to its summer grounds in New Jersey, smoked us. We had the last laugh when we passed him at the fuel dock in Jekyll Island. No autopilot; he's hand steering for 1,500 miles.

Update: We are anchored in the Frederica River at the north end of Lanier Island (map). We had a fair tide a good part of the day, and arrived at Jekyll Island right at high tide for an easy passage through this notoriously shallow creek. The Coastal Kitchen restaurant nearby is still closed for some reason, and we were not up to walking a mile, possibly in the rain, to the next closest place, so we ate aboard. Tomorrow we hope to see our friends John and Laura Lee for lunch before we weigh anchor and continue north.