No 11: Making our way to St Mary’s Boatyard.

St Mary's Boatyard - Georgia, USA.

👉Our Journey on the ICW

I have often said that owning a sailboat teaches you a multitude of life skills. You are also confronted with a multitude of feelings and emotions. If you haven’t got any resilience and need to learn about resilience – Go Sailing!

Travelling up north to St Marys Boatyard, where Passages will stay for about 4 -5 months while we return to Perth, as Mel needs to work to pay for the new chain plates, we were confronted with some challenging and basically awful weather.

We understand now why so many people from the USA who own sailboats, start making their way back out of the hurricane zone by the end of May, as the weather was just plain awful: Hot and humid in the mornings, then almighty thunder and lightning storms in the afternoon.

This is what we experienced almost every day we were travelling up the St Marys Boatyard, on the Georgia/Florida border.

We tried to go out into the open sea, but we were hampered with north and northeast winds so we, reluctantly, stayed on the ICW. It was quite fascinating to journey along the ICW – see video.

We spent two nights in Melbourne and Titusville, one night in Daytona, two nights on a mooring ball in St Augustine – the oldest city in the USA, where we did a trolley tour around the old town. We were hoping to sail from St Augustine to St Mary’s Inlet BUT when we were over halfway and had
approximately 25 Nmiles to go, an almighty storm and severe weather warning was issued, so we ducked into Jacksonville. As we were entering the harbour, the storm hit us – see the photo taken from some friends of ours, Dana, and Chris. We meet Dana and Chris on Black Elise II while in Guatemala. They arrived in St Augustine on our second day there. They took the photo of the storm, and sent it to us, when they checked to see if we were okay. We eventually found a very small anchorage upstream, on the ICW and spent a relatively peaceful night there before heading to St Marys passing the port of Fernandina.

👉Tour of St. Augustine

As mentioned, we were confronted with some awful storms and many nights we would watch the lightening streak across the nights sky.

One of the highlights of our journey up the ICW, was stopping off at Titusville to watch the Space X
Falcon 9 launch 52 Starlink satellites into low earth orbit. The launch was scheduled for 3.10am, Monday morning 12 June, so we set our alarms so we could watch it. We were approximately 5 kms away from it, but the brightness of the launch and the sound was quite amazing to see and hear.

So… here we are in St Marys Boatyard. It was quite a journey getting here as we had to consider the tides. The tidal range here is 1.6 metres and there is PLENTY of soft mud. Many times, our depth sounder alarm would go off as there was less than 1 metre below our keel. (Mel has set the depth sounder alarm to go off when we have less than a metre below – it is for safety reasons). We spent 4 nights anchored off in the St Mary’s Inlet, waiting to be hauled out, which eventually happened on Tuesday 20 June 2023. So once again Passages is on dry land although she has quite a good view of the whole of St Marys inlet.

Before we leave her, we clean pack away and cover her. She has so many covers!

So, until next time (January 2024??) – enjoy whatever you are doing. Keep safe, Be Kind and Be Happy.

Bye for now.

Mel and Caryn