Our jaunt on the ICW ended a few miles up the Brunswick River at the Brunswick Landing Marina. Our boat will stay here, in a slip in the marina, for all of hurricane season while Mike and I will also do some land travel.
Brunswick is a large, lovely marina with a strong sense of community. Our dock fees here include laundry, the use of shared bikes and gas grills, and access to the club house with its frequent cruiser happy hours. It’s just a short walk to historic downtown Brunswick with some good restaurants, lovely shaded parks, a farmers market, and even a rum distillery.
Marina club houseFree beer at happy hourBrunswick’s Old City HallOne of the beautiful town squaresRichland Rum Distillery Dinner with Island Spirit and Painkiller
Ok, enough fun – we still need to prepare for hurricane season and the possibility of severe summer storms. We’ve got an open-close checklist that we’ve used for years, but with a new boat and new systems, we have to review it and modify it. Also, we’re staying in the water this summer instead of hauling out, so we need to prepare a bit differently for that too. Basically, our priorities are to fix as many leaks as possible before we leave the boat unattended, and to reduce the windage and add lots of dock lines so that when heavy storms do occur, there’s little to no damage. Fingers crossed!
Most of our portlights are leaking in heavy rain, so we are gradually removing one at a time, cleaning and scraping off all the old caulk and silicone, and rebedding each one cleanly. We’re getting better at it, but each one still takes about 6 hours from start to finish. It’s a lot of work, AND mess. And it leaves a hole in the boat for hours at a time – not good in spring rain storms! It will be worth it when we can be confident that the rain stays on the outside and we don’t have to worry about water damage to the wood or anything else on the interior.
We took down our jib and staysail, covered all hatches and portlights, flushed the engine and outboard, did oil changes, defrosted the fridge, wiped the entire interior with white vinegar to discourage mold, and fixed a link to the cockpit shower. There’s always plenty of tasks that require Mike to squeeze into a small space!
They say there are two kinds of sailors on the ICW – those who have run aground, and those who are lying and say they haven’t. Just north of St Augustine, we joined the first club.
Surprisingly cold on the waterDredgers = shoaling
It was a long, fairly boring day of putt-putting along. Capt Mike was at the helm, and I had gone below to get a head start on dinner prep. Suddenly, I heard the sound of the engine change dramatically and I popped my head up into the cockpit like a groundhog to find out what was going on. Capt. Mike just had enough time to say “I slowed way down ’cause I’ve got to figure out where the deep water is” when we stopped cold. Dinner forgotten, I grabbed an extra copy of the charts for reference, and I scanned around us for red and green channel markers. In the meantime, Capt. Mike had thrown the throttle into reverse and gave it a ton of revs, hoping to simply back off whatever shoal we had hit. No luck. The 2-knot current was pushing the stern into even shallower water. We tried swinging the boom way out to one side to tilt the boat over and hopefully to slide off. Nope. Mike dropped the dinghy into the water and tried to push the bow into deeper water like a little tug boat, while I steered from the helm. Nope. I started talking about BoatUS towing service and the captain shushed me. “We’ll stay here until high tide if we have to, but we don’t need to call for a tow”
A giant motor yacht passed us just as we got stuck and hailed us on the radio. “Have you run aground? Need anything? Ok, good luck” Gee, thanks. A small sport fishing boat came by with two huge outboard motors and offered to help tow us off. So once again, I took the helm, Capt. Mike moved the dinghy around to port midships and started pulling in reverse using our 20hp outboard. The fishing boat stayed on the forward starboard side and pulled with their two 75hp motors. Between the towing, our own engine revs, and a few short bursts of the bow thruster, we were off and floating! Unfortunately, I almost swamped Capt. Mike in the dinghy as we went from zero to 5.5 knots in an instant and he was still holding onto the boat going backwards. Oops! All’s well that ends well, and we thanked the fishermen warmly and continued on our way. For the rest of the trip north, we both stayed on high alert any time the charts said “shoal warning”… even when the channel markers were in plain sight.
We anchored off Fernadina Beach on Amelia Island that night to lick our wounds. Feeling like ourselves again the next day we went ashore to experience all that the annual Shrimp Festival had to offer. Garlic shrimp, shrimp quesadilla, shrimp and corn boil, a parade of decorated shrimp boats. Even people wearing big orange shrimp hats. We ate and danced and walked and had an excellent time, topping it all off with some of the best upscale Mexican food we’d had in ages, enjoying the night out with our friends Hayden and Radeen on Island Spirit.
Patriotic Shrimp BoatGarlic shrimpColor-coordinated shrimp girlEnjoying the live musicDinner with Island Spirit
From Amelia Island, it was just a short hop north to Cumberland National Seashore, which I’d always wanted to visit. From the anchorage, it’s an easy dinghy ride to the park where most guests arrive on a ferry from St Mary’s, Georgia. Yay – we made it to Georgia! I really enjoyed getting the chance to stretch my legs on the shady park trails where I saw the cutest armadillo, wild horses, and even a glimpse of a bobcat! This park has a little bit of everything: natural beauty, the ruins of the Carnegie’s summer home, a long white sand beach. And we’d almost have to be backpacking and camping to be able to cover the many miles of trails. It was the perfect final stop on our floating ICW vacation!
After our busy stay in the boat yard in Fort Pierce, it felt great to be back on the water and on the move! We slowly made our way up the Inter Coastal Waterway, or ICW, from Fort Pierce to Brunswick GA exploring local communities along the way and getting familiar with our boat systems and electronics as we went. The ICW is generally protected water compared to traveling in the open ocean, and to keep in the narrow channel we mostly motor. Each day, we passed several bridges and it’s always a challenge to plan ahead, researching which bridges are tall enough for us to pass safely underneath and which we have to time just right around scheduled draw bridge openings.
It’s surprisingly challenging to get used to helming a new boat! Absolutely everything works differently than on Sanitas – the throttle, the chart plotter, the autopilot, the AIS – luckily, the previous owners left all the owners manuals behind, so I spent a few hours each day studying up and figuring things out. Capt Mike mostly prefers the “Just hit all the buttons and see what happens” approach 😆 We each learn in our own way, right?
The best part about being back in the USA, is that we get to catch up with friends and family we haven’t seen in person in ages! Our first fun friend meetup was just north of Melbourne Florida where we had lunch with Paul Brickman and his family. We’ve been friends since before Mike and I were married, back when I used to spend weekends at Dewey Beach just after college – talk about ancient history! So fun to catch up over a yummy lunch at Grills Riverside, and we were so grateful to them for bringing us a few groceries.
We took our first day off since leaving Stewart with a beach day at New Smyrna Beach ⛱️ The city has a great “on-demand” bus system. We walked to a stop only about two blocks from the dinghy dock and caught a bus that basically could bring us anywhere we wanted within city limits, so of course I voted for the beach! It’s a loooooong white sand beach with cars allowed to drive and park on it – how weird is that? We walked for miles on the hard sand before haggling over the price of beach chairs and umbrella and enjoying a lovely little picnic on the beach. Now that’s more like it! Now I remember why I bought a boat! I was starting to forget with all those boat projects!
Another couple of days of putt putting along, and we made it to St Augustine.
St Augustine is a beautiful city – the oldest in America – and a $30 mooring ball at the municipal marina is the best deal in town. We explored the historic fort and lovely Flagler College, did a big grocery shopping trip, and went out for ice cream with cruising friends. We even had the chance to connect with sailing friends we last saw almost five years ago in the Bahamas! We had a lovely sushi picnic with Natalia and Andrey on SV Bella Vita under a full moon 🌙
As soon as we left Stuart, Florida on our way north, we decided our new boat needed a little love. So we pulled into Cracker Boy Boat Works in Fort Pierce for a few days of hard and dirty work! (In case you hadn’t guessed, this is going to be another “keepin’ it real” blog post)
We were lucky to find a DIY yard where we could do some of the work ourselves to save some money (Thanks, Bill!) but these three days in the yard would still wind up costing about 3.5 “boat units” – yikes! As we approached the haul out slip on Tuesday morning, we radioed the boat yard to let them know we were here. The office manager replied that the crew was almost ready for us – come in slowly with no lines and no fenders…. What? That’s a first for us, and I felt very nervous standing on the bow with nothing to do. But Capt. Mike drove us into the skinny little slip like a champ. And the crew did a great job of communicating and guiding us in with little more than boat hooks. Phew. It’s always a relief to get into a slip without anything going wrong!
The first job we tackled was replacing the CQR anchor with a new 85-pound Mantus we fondly refer to as “The Beast” ⚓ It’s literally the biggest anchor that would fit on our bow and we will sleep much better through wind, tide changes, and heavy current knowing The Beast is keeping us safe. Capt Mike did a ton of research, including trying to decipher our mystery anchor chain (C4 chain is not the same as G4 chain) and to ensure our windlass could handle the heavy load. While we were at it, we marked every 25 feet of chain with colored zip ties so that I know how much rode I am letting out as I drop anchor.
Next, we replaced all the zinc anodes on the hull. Zincs are intended to be “sacrificial” and to corrode more quickly than other important metal boat parts. On Sanitas, we only had two zincs to deal with. On this bigger boat, with more complex systems, we had tons! Including on the bow thruster and related to the refrigerator cooling system. My turn to do tons of research to try to figure out the right shape and size and number to order. (I was mostly right – only two of the zincs I ordered didn’t fit – oops) While we were at it, we scraped barnacles off the prop and bow thruster blades and painted them with epoxy.
Our main priority was to apply new anti-foul paint to the bottom. We knew of one spot where the bottom paint was scraped off, and we wanted to have a nice clean bottom before leaving her in the water in a brackish river without moving for six months. Sounds easy enough, right? But unseasonable Florida thunderstorms were out to get us, cutting our working hours short each day.
In fact, on Wednesday evening we endured one of the strongest storms I’ve ever weathered on a sailboat…. In the boat yard! Our wind instruments aren’t working, so I can’t tell you exactly the max wind speeds, but Capt. Mike estimated sustained winds of 40 to 50kts. The boatyard measured gusts of 68kts. 😲 The worst part was wind came from the side instead of the bow and really shook the entire structure, while heavy rain and hail fell. Mike went out in the worst of the storm to rescue cockpit cushions that were blowing around AND he watched the blades to the bow thruster (which we had taken apart to paint with anti-foul) catch the wind and start somersaulting across the boat yard. Yes, he sprinted after them and made a heroic rescue. That would have been an expensive loss! For my part, I was dressed in my fouly, with my shoes tied, holding a waterproof bag of our phones and wallets, sitting on the floor at the bottom of the companionway, braced in case the boat fell off the stands. Ready to run through the storm if Mike told me to. Luckily, none of that was necessary and we all survived with only some damage to one of the cockpit enclosure panels and an antenna. Phew!
One more challenge to this stint in the boatyard was our lodging. The yard doesn’t allow anyone to live on their boats overnight so I had to find a hotel or Airbnb. The only reasonably priced place I could find was a dumpy motel about 2 miles away on Rt 1. So each morning, and each evening we had a 2-mile walk to get to work – except for the two times Mike hitched us a ride! Luckily, we walked right by a Dunkin each morning – hurray for ‘Merica!
Between the long commute, the storms, and the long list of jobs, it’s a minor miracle that we finished the bottom paint in time. My back still hurts just thinking about it. But we did it! And scrambled to put everything back together before our 9:30 splash appointment on Friday morning. Yes, I did temporarily lose the bolt required to put the bow thruster back together, but that’s another story. Capt. Mike frantically painted the spots where the stands were, just as the lift crew arrived and stood around watching him, smoking their cigarettes and tapping their feet.
But we did it! Back in the water in time to make the 10:00 bridge opening. Huzzah!
I can’t believe it’s been a month since we packed up our lives in Grenada and flew to Florida to meet our new boat. Time sure does fly!
It was much easier clearing our big blue barrels of household goods into the US than it was on the Grenadian side. Less than a week after we arrived in Stuart, Florida we had all of our things and just needed to figure out where to put it all.
The town of Stuart is absolutely lovely, but we didn’t get much opportunity to enjoy it at first – we had too much to do…. We bought a larger, used dinghy from our friend Bill Roy and Capt. Mike spent a few days getting the outboard running smoothly. For his next trick, he installed dinghy davits – arms that allow us to lift the dinghy out of the water at night for safety, and to carry the dinghy out of the water while we are sailing. They turned out great!
Next, we went to work on solar power. Our boat has a nearly-new inboard generator which efficiently sips diesel to generate power. But it takes about two hours in the morning and another hour and a half in the evening to keep the batteries full while running the fridge and lights and keeping things charged. That’s a lot of noise! Not the way we want to live off- grid long term. Mike worked with Alexander to build a stainless steel structure above the shade Bimini and installed three 200-watt solar panels. After pulling loads of cable and installing a Victron MPPT controller, we have power! On a sunny day, our batteries are full by noon.
We have many more complicated systems than we had on simple little Sanitas. Lots to learn! For example, Mike said on this boat we’d be able to drink the water right out of our tanks because we have a built-in filtration system. But because the boat had been sitting unused for a while, the water initially tasted gross. So … we dug into every cupboard, found the water filter system, ordered new filters and voila! Yummy, great tasting water.
Then, the first night we venture out to socialize with other Island Packet owners at a Marina happy hour, we returned home to find a flashing red light illuminating the interior. Apparently our “magic head” (electric toilet) wasn’t so magical at the moment. We’ve got this super cool space age Electro-Scan head that uses electricity to sanitize waste so you can legally eject it overboard… when it works properly. We had to do a lot of investigating and eventually send a few emails back and forth to the extremely patient previous owners before we figured out how to add extra salt water to the system.
After a week of perfect sunny Florida weather, a week of rain set in, and we discovered that our hopefully dry cockpit… wasn’t. With enough rain, the Sunbrella fabric quickly got saturated, and the rain just flowed straight through. So we ordered a gallon of 303 waterproofing and went to work. Did I mention how grateful we are that Amazon delivers to Sunset Bay Marina, and how equally grateful I am that the marina employees didn’t shame me for the number of packages I picked up in one month?
Eventually, we came up for air and started to enjoy the marina lifestyle. And we had friends! Beth, on Stargazer, was moored only two balls away from us. And Adele and Herman, on Willful, made it safely back from Puerto Rico via The Bahamas and joined us in the mooring field. We met new friends, like Ray and Amanda on Elysium who bought their beautiful boat the same week we did. And Matt and Brooklyn on TwoCan who work hard on yachts in Fort Lauderdale all week, and then spend the weekends in Stuart working on their own boat. We even had the chance to finally meet up with Hayden and Radeen on Island Spirit who helped us buy our Island Packet and who serve as the gurus and cheerleaders for the IP community.
And, better yet, we had two different visits from family during our month in Stuart! My parents came to visit just before they started their big road trip back north to New York for the summer and Mike’s Mom was visiting a neighbor on the west coast of Florida so she made the trip over to Stuart to visit us and to see our new boat! It’s so nice to know that our parents can picture this life we are living and our new home! It’s very special.
What Floats Our Boat 