Sunday, December 20, 2009 St. Augustine, Florida

St. Augustine, Florida N29 53.299 W81 18.404

The Tolomato River anchorage was a nice quiet respite from the previous couple nights. We broke anchor at 9:45am and got into St. Augustine Harbor sometime after 11:00 and checked out the north anchorage in front of the fort. Hey they were shooting canons at us. There wasn’t a lot of room here, so we caught the 11:30 bridge opening through the Bridge of Lions (still under construction – since 2005) and came to the south anchorage. Got the anchor settled into 13 feet of water, by 12:00pm, during a change of tides. We traveled a whopping 9.6 miles today and it was cold. I think it was in the upper 30s. Caught the weather forecast for back home and it looks like it’s 25 there and it’s going to be 30 here tonight. So far (knock on wood) it’s been a blissfully uneventful day. We were going to see how the boat settles in here before going into town, but more boats keep showing up and anchoring around us. We may just wait until tomorrow to venture into town.

Spaghetti for dinner.

Below is a picture of the fort from the water as we left it going to the south side of the Bridge of Lions.

At sunset the pirate galleon the Black Raven (takes tourists out and yo ho ho's them) hoisted her sails with passengers aboard. You could hear them singing sea shanties and yohohoing all over the harbor. They passed through the swing bridge to the north side where the fort is then came back through singing once again, rounding our anchorage as a large black sloop came cutting in front of it to go into the marina. Modern sailing ship meets olden one. It was just one of those moments that it all seemed to fit together and click for some reason.

Started reading Tess Gerritsen’s Body Double. It managed to hook me. She seems like she’s in the same genre as Tom Harris or James Patterson. Thanks for the recommendation Sandy :0)