9:00 and I’m not at church. It feels like playing hooky, and I
love it! We got going around 8:30 this morning, putting the dinghy back on top
of the boat and casting off around 9:00. We have to travel through an
especially low area during its high tide, and that’s around 1:00. We’re heading
to St. Augustine for a few nights in a marina, planning to visit with Grandad
and Keith, do some shopping, and see the area.
After that big rainstorm at our Palm Shores anchorage two
nights ago, the weather has cleared and is cool and beautiful again. I am
covered with tiny bites from no-see-ums that probably came through the open
hatch between rain showers. I think it’s my reading light that draws them to me
as much as anything.
The ICW changes as we move northward. Sometimes the waterway
is a natural body of water, wide and open and windy. Other times, it’s a
straight man-made canal, wide enough for two boats to pass, but we often have
to travel at no-wake speeds. Sometimes that is for erosion, sometimes for
fishermen in boats, and sometimes for manatee areas. So far we have seen only
the nose of one manatee.
Along the ICW, there are towns with multi-million dollar homes
and monster-sized boats, then there are places with small houses, medium
houses, trailers or just open spaces. There are not as many palm trees
here as there were in the south, but there are lots of medium-height trees and
shrubs along the waterway and in people’s yards. Many of the shrubs are in
bloom now and so pretty. You can tell when the landscaping was done a long time
ago, when it’s new, when it was done by a professional or when it was done by
ordinary people.
Along the way, we are using a guidebook called “On the Water
Chartguides, CruiseGuide for the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), A Mile-by-Mile
Cruising Guide for Norfolk to Miami” by Captain Mark Doyle and Captain Diana
Doyle. We definitely recommend it for anyone traveling the ICW, especially
novices. It lists all the bridges, obstacles, shoaling areas, obstructions,
marinas and anchorages on the ICW from mile marker 0 to mile marker 1098. In
our case, we have to read the book from back to front since we are heading
north.
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