St Augustine, FL to New Smyrna Beach, FL, January 31, 2022
Finally, despite the shorter daylight hours of winter, we have a jump that can be accomplished by leaving in the morning and we can comfortably arrive before sunset. We checked this journey a number of times on the various maps and it looked like it was going to be a pretty simple matter and it turned out to be just that. Sitting just a few feet from the bridge, it was a piece of cake to request an opening on the radio and just drift over to hop through once it opened. Of course, Lisa and I echoed the bridge tender's broadcasts to ourselves on the bluetooth headsets we use to communicate when we are casting off! Having already done the harbor at St Augustine once before, we were confident that it would go smoothly and the inlet at the other end looked well-marked and easy to navigate as well. We planned to actually stop short of New Smyrna and simply anchor off the Ponce de Leon inlet since we planned to just get up and continue onward the next day.
We had a curious incident on the sail. My recently declared spirit animal is the pelican and partway through our short journey down the Florida coast a pelican flew past, circled the boat and decided to land on our lifelines. He remained there, precariously balancing with his huge floppy feet wrapped around the thin cord, swaying in the wind and with the motion of the boat for 10 minutes or so.
Pelican stubbornly clinging to the life line
Maybe this is some kind of message from my spirit animal or just a very weird coincidence, but it seemed very odd. I've experienced small birds resting on boats farther from shore, but I've not heard of pelicans doing this and as you can see, we were very close to shore, so you'd think he wouldn't be too tired. Eventually he decided that the tightrope act was for the bird <rim shot> and he hopped down on the deck. Unlike every other pelican I've encountered, he didn't try to fly away when I got close and seemed totally chill around me. I took a few photos and then went back to actually driving the boat. He eventually groomed himself for a while, tucked his head under his wing and settled in for a nap. After maybe 30 minutes, he decided he was fully rested, turned into the wind opened his wings and very slowly lifted off Dragonfly and flew away. I know that they can be an annoyance for docked boats and have a tendency to poop excessively on parked boats, but he didn't even leave me any gifts of that sort.
When we arrived at our planned anchorage, it turned out to be a bit more narrow in the creek than I realized from the map and we knew that we would swing 180 degrees in the current. The first spot we picked ended up feeling a bit too close to shore for comfort once we laid out our anchor chain. The second spot worked, although we eventually decide that even there we might go ahead and reduce the amount of chain we used so that we were 100% sure we wouldn't swing too far into the shallows. We tend to be pretty conservative with our anchoring and probably generally put down too much chain, but it helps us sleep better and there were no other boats to worry about, just a shore and sand bar, Once we settled in, we made dinner and sat out on the back to watch the sunset and one other little thing we had heard about.
We knew that we were roughly 30 miles north of the planned SpaceX launch that night and we were pretty sure we would have a pretty decent view of the thing. The launch was supposed to take place the day before and we heard that you could see it from where we were in St Augustine, which was another 55 miles north. However that launch was scrubbed when a big cruise ship just casually motored on out into the restricted waters around the launch site. Apparently they take the risk of a crash very seriously and cancelled the entire launch because of this. I'm guessing Elon sent a bill to Royal Caribbean for that little maneuver. The story I got was that the Coast Guard tried to reach the cruise ship and turn them around and the ship either didn't respond or didn't comply fast enough. Someone is in big trouble. As a result, the Coast Guard was making announcements about today's launch over and over, like every half hour with very stern warning about all the bad things that would happen if you wandered too close. We queued up the SpaceX live feed and played it over the boats speakers as we waited to see what would happened. As the countdown hit like 1 minute to go, we saw a huge fireball in the sky to the south. Apparently the live-stream isn't exactly live/live. It was quite remarkable -- we got to see the rocket rise, the stages separate and watched the re-entry burn as the first stage safely landed back at the Cape. I secretly wished we could have been a bit closer, but it was still a really spectacular experience. Our pictures don't really do it justice.
With that highlight over, we found ourselves rapidly tiring with the sunset. I stayed awake long enough to assure myself that we would hold anchor when the tide reversed and that we wouldn't careen into land at any point during the transition and then slept like a log. I required slightly more sleep than my spirit animal, but I did wake up and double check the anchor alarm a half dozen times or so. Like my pelican buddy, I also didn't poop on the boat. Go me.
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