Saturday, December 26, 2009 St. Augustine to Ft. Matanzas, Rattlesnake Island, Fl

Wayne communicating with our Christmas Guest
After a nice sunrise and coffee topside, we dinghied over to the marina for a last shower here. They really have nice showers here – very clean and a lot of hot water. I think that this is probably one of the nicest facilities but it should be since they charge you $10 a day to dock and use their facilities. We ran into Cordelia coming back to the dinghy and it looks like they’re heading to Ft. Matanzas also. So we’ll probably run into them there. They’re a nice couple (the couple from Marquette).

We left St. Augustine’s and pulled into the Matanzas inlet round 1:50pm (picture above us in inlet at the fort). It was kind of skinny coming into the Matanzas inlet and we saw 5.0 on our depth sounder (the transducer that measures depth is a foot below water level) turning in south of Green 81A. This was worrisome because we should have been at high tide and had room to spare. After we got anchored I was looking at our chart plotter and the 81A I followed last time into this spot was not the one we went around this time. This one was 81B the last time which explained the depths. Hate when they move things and then they’re not correct! Cordelia pulled in closer to Green 81 and told us they had depths of 12-13 ft range, which sounded more appropriate. We’ll have to follow the chart plotter out in the morning. What’s worse is we’ll probably be leaving somewhere around low tide and the charts say that the depths to this spot at low tide are 5 ft. I’ll have to check the times and make sure we don’t leave at low tide.

We dinghied over to the park landing to take the ferry over to the fort for the grand tour. They don’t allow docking over at the fort. Going over to the headquarters, everyone was pointing up in the trees. There was a horned owl up there snoozing away. Cordelia pointed it out to me. It was a beauty. I couldn’t get it to open its eyes though no matter what sounds I made. I was told that it had beautiful yellow eyes.

The tour was informative but sanitized. They didn’t mention the slaughter of the 300 people on those grounds or that the mode of death was by stabbing the people to death. Matanzas means slaughter. They only mentioned there were a couple of slaughters that occurred here. We were told that it was unknown if it was for political reasons or religious. I also learned that La Florida means the flower or the flowers. I never knew that Florida was named for flowers – it makes sense.

It was interesting to see the fort quarters. The first level had cannons set up to protect the harbor from invading ships that shipwrecked on the shoals. 7-8 soldiers stayed in one room on the first floor. This was also the level that the cannons were located.

The commanding officer, which was the equivalent of a sergeant, had his own room with the ammunitions and stores (food) on the second floor. He even had a little fireplace and writing area.

The top level of the fort was the roof. You climbed through a hole in the roof with a ladder. Once there the view was spectacular. Looking down it looked like we had a cannon pointed right at Kolibrie!

 

There was a gentleman there dressed in early soldier garb that was entertaining and informative. He did a very nice job. He asked one fella how many teeth he had? Then said he definitely qualified to join the garrison. Soldiers were required to have 4 teeth or they couldn’t enlist. He told me I probably didn’t want to kiss anyone unless they had at least double that. Right? LOL.

Right before heading back to the ferry dock, we spotted Cordelia’s crew heading back to their boat and I took some pictures of them. On our way back to the boat, the dolphins started putting in their appearance. It was getting close to sunset. The sky was turning vibrant shades of pink. I took some pictures of the fort and surrounding area then I reheated the rest of the pork roast and we had hot pork sandwiches for dinner.