New Smyrna Beach

We finally left St. Augustine this morning at 6:30, as soon as we could see well enough to thread our way through all the boats moored here.  We were out in front of a pack of boats leaving, most of which caught up with us eventually sometime during the day.  We were back in the "Snowbird Parade," going through bridges together and talking on the radio to those we knew and some we didn't know but had seen several times along the way.  And we saw "islands" of pelicans along the way.

Solid pelicans

 We were supposed to have wind from the NE and we anticipated at least pulling out the jib for some long stretches when we would be headed SE.  All of the weather sites we used predicted the same winds so we were pretty sure that was what we would see.  But no, somehow the weather gods collaborated and determined Tom and Pat should not be allowed to sail as they had hoped.  It was almost east enough to sail but not quite.

To add insult to injury, the tide was always against us.  Now you would expect that if you passed two large inlets to the sea, and were on the water all day you would see the tide come in at some point and go out at some point, and at one point at least (even briefly) it would be going in the same direction as you were headed.  But you would be wrong if you expected that today.  For ten hours we had an opposing current.  Right at the end of our day, right when we were coming to the last bridge at which we had about one minute to spare before it opened, right when we had pushed the engines as far as we thought prudent, and were about half a mile from our final destination - there might have been the slightest little bit of current going in our direction which helped scoot us along in time to make that bridge.  But we're not sure.  Because, in addition to squeezing every little bit of power out of the engines, we had also pulled the jib out and had a tiny bit of wind in the sail, and a power boat had come by and we were surfing down his wake when we saw that we were making 7 knots instead of the daily average of maybe 5.9.

The truth is though that it was still a nice day and we were on the water, moving again.  Even though Tom cursed the tides and the wind and said he was going to take our mast off and just make Kentris into a weird looking power cat, we still had a great day and got to New Smyrna Beach before dark.  And we were invited to a potluck at the dock with some fun people.  And later, when we walked down the little main street of town to get some much needed exercise, we found it decorated for Christmas, Florida-style.

A palm tree Christmas

Who can beat that?