Tolomato River

We left this morning around 830am timing our departure with high tides due to shoaling early on our route. There were lots of reports of shoaling along our way but thankfully we didn’t find any! We did go under 8 bridges today, at one of them the current was so strong that with over 5 kts of current we were only able to do .7 of a kt over ground… not fun.

   Interesting fact that we read is that every day over one thousand people move to Florida and also that one in twenty residents own a watercraft… You can see one of those boats below, note that when three engines just won’t due go for the forth.

One area that we passed today was quite shallow along shore so the docks were way out in the water so much so that they use a golf cart to get out to there.

We also passed a large Navy dry dock just outside of Jacksonville. As we were approaching Jacksonville we could see a large Nuclear plant and Richard kept commenting on the fact that we seemed to see it for most of the day as we wound in and around through the marshes.

The houses today were definitely different from the ones in the Carolinas and Georgia. They were still for the most part huge but it was interesting to see that there were quite a number of older and very run down houses interspersed amongst them and it was evident that some had been torn down and large ones were taking their places. Since we are travelling  at this time of year we haven’t been bothered by bugs that often but obviously they are a problem in these marshy areas, check out the screened in areas behind some of these houses. We were surprised to see Ronald MacDonald at one of the houses…

 Our plan was to only go about thirty miles today and as we were approaching where we were going to anchor Steve in Slow Flight, who was ahead of us, was checking out some spots. As we rounded a corner we could see him in an anchorage but unfortunately he had gone aground:( He had called SeaTow, who was on their way, and since he is faster than us we decided to carry on and he would soon catch up. Turns out that the next few anchorages weren’t good so we ended up traveling 15 more miles for a total of 53 miles today.  SeaTow came but due to the tide going out it ended up taking another two hours for them so get him unstuck. By this time it was getting dark so he ended up anchoring there. We arrived at our spot just before dusk to find it very full and as we motored around looking we found it very shallow so we pressed on. We pulled into a nice empty area just as the sun was setting, we don’t like leaving it this late but it all worked out nicely and the rain started after we were all settled!