We had heard a lot of good things about St. Augustine, and so we decided this would be our next stop along the way. We were going to take the ICW down, but weather was looking pretty nice for a sail outside, and so we decided to take that weather and make the hop outside.
It was a bit of an odd distance for us at 50NM from inlet to inlet. At 5 knots average that is 10 hours, plus an hour or so getting into or out each inlet, and you are right at that annoying not enough daylight to really do it. So we opted for an overnight sail, leaving before sunset, sailing through the night to arrive the next morning. This means sailing at night, but we've gotten pretty good at this now, and it seemed to be the best way to tackle it. Although because the night is longer this time of year, it meant we needed to slow it down a bit to extend the sail to 12 hours or so as not to arrive in the dark.
We had a lazy day at anchor, I worked, Aria and Theone did school, etc. We pulled up anchor just near sunset and set off underway. It was pretty dark by the time we got to the channel for the inlet at St. Marys, and we even came across a sailboat without lights coming in the inlet that kind of freaked me out as I didn't see it until it was pretty close. But we made it out just fine, and it all gets pretty easy once you are in the ocean at large. Very little if any traffic to watch out for, and lots of room.
The wind was non-existent at first, but filled in as predicted shortly after getting out there. It was nicely behind us, and we ended up just going along with the genoa, and then a mostly reefed genoa. The waves were a little more than we were hoping and it was quite a rolly night as the wind kept building.
We were trying to time the St. Augustine inlet for early morning at slack tide. For both daylight to see whats going on, and reasonable currents. We had ended up going too fast at the start of the sail, and so spent the last half of the sail trying to go slow which is the opposite of everything I'm usually trying to do. I think we also had a bit of current in our favour as well, which didn't help the going slow part. We ended up running on bare poles (no sails at all) for the last few hours and even that was quicker than we needed and had to waste a bit of time mulling around the entrance tacking back and forth for a bit. A couple other boats came in to the entrance at the same time as us as well. We eventually all made our way in through the inlet at daybreak.
We made our way towards the marina, which we booked for 3 nights. We needed water, showers, etc so this seemed like a good place to do it. We had to wait for a bridge opening, and then called the marina. Check in wasn't until 11am, but we were hoping to get lucky if they didn't already have someone in the slip. But they did, so we went and anchored somewhat sketchily at the back of the mooring field. I got a bit of sleep (I did the midnight to 4am shift and was zonked), and then at 11 we raised anchor and motored back up to the marina and tired up securely into our slip right downtown St. Augustine.
We are looking forward to the next few days here.
