March 1- 3 St. Augustine, New Smyrna Beach, Melbourne, Fort Pierce FL

We had a great time in St. Augustine, a beaautiful city.  We docked at the municipal marina, just under the Bridge of Lions.

Dock Bird

Twilight Time at twilight.

Next stop was New Smyrna Beach, where we decided to take a chance on  the Smryna Yacht Club, utilizing our reciprocal agreements from the Lahaina Yacht Club in Maui.  We will skip it next time.  Not much to it, including the fact that the docks had no cleats, only pilings.  Took us by surprise, as you don't find that a lot.  Nice restaurant though.

Coming in to Melbourne we made a navigational error (the wrong bridge)  that put us into a small creek in which a boat of our size does not belong.  But no harm done, except to our egos, particularly since we both made the mistake.  The stop at Melbourne is necessitated by (of course) a restaurant, The Mansion.  Not only does it have great food, but it also contains a huge wine and beer store (room after room), as well as a nice coffee bar, deli and catering services.  As the name implies it is located in an old home and has a lovely rooftop dining area overlooking the Indian River.  On a milc night in FL it is perfect.

We arrived Monday in Fort Pierce and reunited with our "J Dock" friends.  It was great to catch up on each others comings and goings during the last 8 months. We met some new boaters as well.   Another Saturday night party is happening tonight.

Fort Pierce City Marina

Saturday morning was beautiful, bright, clear and cool.  We stopped by the farmers' market early, picked up some tomatoes and beautiful citrus.

We have been settling in nicely in Fort Pierce.  When we are cruising there is little time for making repairs.  So of course we have many small items that need work - gauges not working properly, grill that wants to fall apart, some electrical issues , and some engine problems, coolant leakage, outboard motor to the dinghy in need of repair or replacement, etc.  Always something on a boat! It keeps Mal quite occupied. 

The new Garmin charplotter

Those of you less familiar with boating may be interested in understanding our chartplotter.  Basically it is just like the GPS in your car, except that instead of roads and street names you have markers and waterways shown.  Perhaps you can see the little boat on the screen?  If you are on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, the screen shows a magenta line.  You can ALMOST just follow that line north and south.  The chartplotter is one of the great 20th century technological advances in cruising.  While it does not make paper charts obsolete (one never knows when the power might go out) it does make it much harder to get lost!  And just like in your car, you can choose a destination and have the chartplotter route to it.  For backup to that we also have the Navionics app on the IPad, but that requires wi-fi.  We have a 4G hotspot that almost always can pick up a signal. Most marinas have wi-fi and some sort of rudimentary cable.

March 1, 2014
Fernandina Beach FL to St. Augustine FL

Our day started off very chilly but steadily improved.  We came in to St. Augustine City Marina in our long underwear and it was 70 degrees.  But everyone was overdressed,  including the dockhands.

Both of us had been to St. Augustine before, but didn't feel that we had a good look at the whole town, so decided to stay over an extra day.

We docked right next to the Bridge of Lions

which is right downtown.  Nice marina.

It is a beautiful, old (settled by the Spanish in 1565) city, and is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the US.  It is extremely well preserved, with beautiful 19th century Spanish Renaissance architecture.  We visited the old Spanish fort, the Castillo de San Marcos,  where volunteers dressed in Spanish uniforms (and speaking Spanish) demonstrated cannon firing.

We spent quite a bit of time at Flagler College, the site of the once luxurious but now defunct Ponce de Leon Hotel, built in 1888 by Henry Flagler, the founder of Standard Oil.  This is one of the first great hotels in Florida and really opened the state to tourism.  Prior to that time the only people who went to FL were those suffering from tuberculosis.  Flagler also built a railroad that ran from New York City to St. Augustine so tourists had a convenient way to get there.

 In the college's dining hall, once the ballroom for the hotel,  is the largest collection of Tiffany stained glass in the world.  Quite a sight.  Amazing murals and ceiling frescos are painted throughout the public areas, and it only took 18 months to build!

We are presently cruising down the Matanzas River, almost to Flagler Beach, on a beautiful, 70 degree Florida day. We are on our way to New Smyrna Beach and the Smyrna Yacht Club.

February 23-26, 2014
Beaufort SC, Thunderbolt GA, New Teakettle Creek, GA to Fernandina Beach FL

Well, so much for the rule about doing the blog update before happy hour each day!  Our only excuse is that we were busy sightseeing in Savannah.

For the first 2 days our weather was once again just about perfect.

Beaufort SC Sunset

A Savannah Pirate wannabe

 The next day we docked in Thunderbolt, GA, (supposedly named by the Indians after a giant (guess what) struck the area.  I think the settlers (Oglethorp and crew) arrived shortly thereafter and probably took credit for it.

Thunderbolt is really a Savannah suburb and only about a 10 minute drive into downtown.  Savannah is really easily toured by one of the many trolley tours that go round and round the historic district.  But it is amazingly a difficult city to capture in photos, as the whole is so beautiful.  Even the professional postcard photographers don't come close.

The most important part of Savannah may be the food.  We both fondly remember from years past Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room.   then there is the LONG meal, served family style:

Then there is the LOOOONG meal inside, served family style!  The fried chicken is the best we have ever had.

Thunderbolt Sunset

 Last night we anchored out at New Teakettle Creek, same place we stopped last June. 

Sunset at New Teakettle Creek

 If we had been docked somewhere we would probably have stayed put today, as we woke to rain.  However, we wanted to get to a certain spot (Little Mud River) by high tide at 8am so we hauled anchor and moved out early.  Unfortunately it rained (lightly) all day so ruined our good-weather record. 

 It is very wet, cold and dreary behind the wheel, as the isinglass curtain (window) has to be open in order to see out.

But Carol can be very inventive when it comes to her comfort, (note the plastic bag covering her legs) not to mention trying to protect a new and very expensive chartplotter.  Mal is too proud a mariner to resort to such a thing.

We are now in Fernandina Beach, one of our favorite hangouts, and looking forward to dinner at South 29, a hit last year.   Weather looks somewhat better tomorrow but not perfect.  We shall see.

February 16-22, 2014

Swansboro NC,  Wrightsville Beach NC,  Southport NC, Myrtle Beach SC,  Georgetown SC, Charleston SC and Beaufort SC.

We have been blessed with 5 out of 6 beautiful cruising days.  High temps have been in the low 70's and winds have been, for the most part, wonderfully calm.  We have to take advantage of every good day which means not too many "days off" (as if this were work !)  We have been going 5 to 6 hours every day, and while that may not seem like a long day, believe us, when you are out in the sun and salt air, that is a long enough day.  There is something about the motion of the boat, constantly maintaining your balance, being "on your game" the whole time, that is very enervating.  The one who is not behind the wheel is the navigator and lookout, so both of us have to be constantly vigilant.  We try to spell each other every hour or so, because it's easy to become mesmerized by the water and the landscape.  So much of the time we are out in marshes and the low country, and there is no sign of civilization around us.  We have encountered VERY few other boats, as this is kind of the middle of the off season: other boaters have already traveled south and are yet to return north, so there is very little other traffic around us. 

We have a new rule, which is that the blog has to be written at the end of the day,  before (or at least during) happy hour.  Otherwise we say we will get to it tomorrow, and you can see how we have procrastinated again.  We will try to be better.

We always wonder about pink houses.

Southport Sunrise

North Myrtlle Beach

The moment we hit South Carolina it was suddenly in the 70's and T-shirt weather.  Yes!!!

Mal on the look-out in "The Rock Pile"

Georgetown Morning

This is a typical AICW landscape, no others in sight.

The only rainy day we have had was yesterday in Charleston, which meant that we were able to spend an extra day and EAT MORE OYSTERS!!!  4 Dozen in 2 days, plus fried shrimp, corn fritters and homemade chips with blue cheese dip, all fabulous.  Someday we are going to probably find another place besides "Pearlz" to eat in Charleston, but why???

Coming under a bridge south of Charleston

The Admiral at work.  Her neck is great, BTW.










Tomorrow on to Thunderbolt GA, close to Savannah, so we will spend a couple of days so we can tour the city.

We know it has been a very long time since we posted anything here, but we haven't BEEN anywhere on the boat since last September.  But finally we are underway again. 

We have been held up by surgeries, weather, Maui and holidays.

In September 2013 we took "Twilight Time" out of the water for the remainder of hurricane season and returned to CA.  In late September Mal had rotator cuff surgery,  and Carol had a cast on her right wrist for 4 weeks for a torn ligament.  In October we left for Maui for 5 weeks for a little recuperation.  We had a wonderful time there (but no golf) catching up with friends.  Weather was perfect and we were, of course, reminded of just how much we love it there, and why we will settle in once our boating days are done.

We returned to CA just before Thanksgiving and were able to catch up with our family and friends there during the holidays.  In early December Carol had a very successful C1-2 fusion, solving the neck pain she had lived with for the last couple of years.  She wore a brace for a couple of months but now only wears it for particularly strenuous activities (like driving and boating.) 

In January we finally returned to NC, just in time for the fiercest winter weather they have had in a long time.  We flew into Charlotte just as the first snowstorm hit.

We spent a couple of days with Carol's brother Paul and his wife, Audrey, at their new home on Lake Norman, near Charlotte.  Very cold there (for NC) - in the teens day and night.

Their dock on Lake Norman

Then we went on to Cary to see Carol's sisters, Joan and Maureen (and husband Fred), and brother Steve.  Very cold there as well.

Finally we got to Beaufort, had the boat put in the water and the next day an ice and snow storm hit! It may not look like much in these pictures, but ice covered the boat and docks and we couldn't even get off the boat for fear we would slip and slide into the water (43 degrees).

Frozen Over

The following day it rained quite a bit and so the ice gradually melted away.  Stayed very cold in Beaufort and we had some AC & Heater issues that had to be resolved before we could take off.   We were finally able to leave Beaufort on Thursday and are currently in Swansboro, another quaint little harbor town at the intersection of the AICW and the White Oak River.  We were going to go to Wrightsville Beach today but morning rain and afternoon BIG winds have delayed that until tomorrow.  The weather looks pretty good for the next few days so we hope that we can get a little further south in the next week, and maybe get warm.  We are soooo looking forward to FL!!

Summertime

It has turned out to be a very interesting, sometimes frustrating, summer for us.  Twilight Time had been ”on the hard”  having some repairs done.  When she was ready, in mid-July,  we returned from our home in CA to North Carolina.  It was our expectation that we were going to cruise from NC north into the Chesapeake Bay, then on to CT in August.  Unfortunately, Captain Harold decided that he did not have time to spend aboard Twilight Time until late September.

We decided that we never again wanted to be in a position of being dependent on someone else’s schedule to do and go where we wanted.  So in early August we began a 2-week, intensive course at the Annapolis School of Seamanship.

It was an unbelievable amount of information and initially we did not think that our (older) brains could handle it.  We spent every day in class for 8 hours and then every night studying for another 4-6 hours and much time wondering what we had gotten ourselves into!  But in the end we both passed the Coast Guard exam required to get a Captain’s license.  Before you congratulate us we have to remind you that there are many other Coast Guard hoops to jump through!  For example, First Aid/CPR classes, TWIC cards including fingerprint/background checks, physicals (passed) drug testing (passed). The list goes on.

Meanwhile, we are having a good time in North Carolina, working on the boat (there is, of course, no end to projects.) and we have been working with another captain on some very specific maneuvering practice.

We plan to return to CA mid-September then in early October head to Maui for 6 weeks or so.  Life is good!

Carolina Beach NC to Beaufort NC

In Carolina Beach we moored out and friends and Power Squadron buddies of Harold's came to pick us up, bring us to a cocktail party and then to dinner at a nice seafood restaurant. Very pleasant evening.  We enjoyed mooring out - so much easier than docking - no messy lines!

I think our writer (CC) failed to mention that we went softly aground in some very skinny water on the way to Myrtle Beach.  No big deal, no damage, just a little shell shock.  Then between Carolina Beach and Beaufort we went aground again, more seriously, because we had to be towed off by TowBoatUS (nice to have that policy.)  More shell shock.  We may have caused more damage because there is a new vibration at about 1500 rpm.  We'll have it checked later this week.  Hope it's not too expensive.  The writer just needs to make it clear that in both cases she was below decks.  The reader will have to figure out who was on bridge at the time.

We are back in Beaufort, our boat's original home, and the marina even saved our slip for us.  First night back Bobbie came to pick up Harold and we all went to No Name Pizza - how we've missed it!  We arrived here in time for \ Tropical Storm Andrea, and while we had some fierce winds most of the rain came while we were asleep so we didn't even notice.  Everything was tied up tight.

The Captain and the Commander have been doing routine maintenance, changing oil, fan belts, filters, etc., while the Admiral takes care of the more cosmetic aspects of boat ownership - polishing rails, cleaning the windows and Isinglass curtains, swabbing the deck, etc.  Even so, we are loving every moment!

We are staying here another week (with a side trip to Ocracoke, if the weather cooperates) and then going back to CA for 3 weeks.