Ortega River Marina to Sisters Creek to Brunswick Landing Marina

Day #195; Loop Miles to Date = 2,341

What a great couple of days of cruising!

Lot's of pictures to share, so we'll try to be brief. We left Ortega River Marina on Wednesday, and retraced our steps to the Jacksonville city free dock at Sisters Creek. (We are traveling with our friends on both Act lll and Corkscrew.) We are glad that we got an early enough start to secure a spot on this free dock, because by the end of the day, it was packed...8 boats shoe horned into a dock meant for about 6 boats. But we had a great, fun, peaceful evening.

And, on Thursday, we took off early (wheels up before 7am) because we had decided to forgo Fernandino Beach and stretch our legs up to Brunswick, GA. This made for a 60+ mile travel day, which is on the outside of our comfort zone with making the dogs wait for a stop for relief. But, we are so glad that we did, because the weather was grand, the marina we skipped on looked just so-so from our pass by, and Brunswick is a great facility. And, we were all able to catch up to our friends on California Lady. We also had some great photo ops along the way...all in all, it was a really good day. None of the trouble spots (shallow areas) that we had planned for turned out to be any problem at all, as we had ample water, and never a real threat of touching bottom (or worse).

Just for the curious, the tides and currents in this stretch are notable, and need to garner our attention. The tides can vary 6-8 feet daily, and the currents can reach 3+ knots in spots. As an example, within a 4 hour window on Thursday, at the same engine rpm's, our speed ranged from 5.7mph to 10.8 mph...a fairly significant spread. So, for trip planning, this can have an obvious impact, and needs to be accounted for each day. The tides themselves are more an issue when docking at fixed docks. Since the water level can vary so much, attention to what your dock lines are doing all of the time is necessary...and planning for how you get on and off the boat can be a factor as well. When lucky (like right now) we dock at floating docks, so your boat floats along with the dock as the tide rises and falls, so dock lines are set once, and then mostly ignored.

One other item of note - we crossed into Georgia yesterday after 161 days in the state of Florida. It'll probably be 7 months until we return next, and by that time, we will have visited at least another 5 states.

And now for some pics...

Downtown Jacksonville

The Maxwell House Plant in JAX...Rob made a sales call here way back in about 1990...included just for grins.

This looked like it belonged in an old Sci-Fi movie. We decided that it was used to load grain, or other granular materials onto barges.

Eagle #1 for the day...

And shortly thereafter, Eagle #2.

Much of the day looked like this...with ACT lll ahead...

And Corkscrew behind...we were in the middle today.

Our friendly neighborhood Coast Guard Auxiliary out for a cruise.

And then the US Coast Guard.

Wait a minute...is that a large caliber gun on the bow of this one? That's not typical...what's going on?

ACT lll is about to find out! They are headed into a "fleet" of large Coast Guard boats.

What we decided is that we had stumbled onto a bunch of Coast Guard boats out on exercises...some training most likely. Before we got close to them, we could see them making numerous high speed maneuvers...they settled down as we got close though.

It was really a neat experience...fun to see them out in a large group. Usually we only see them one at a time, and not the larger boats all that often.

This guy just seemed to be gently telling us to just move along...and mind your manners.

Then as we passed them, they circled around behind Corkscrew, and started all over again.

Just as we were passing Cumberland Island, we also passed the US Naval Submarine Base at Kings Bay. This patrol boat was making certain that we pleasure boats stayed where we were supposed to. We didn't see the sub that was docked here, but our friends on ACT lll reported spotting it hiding back in there somewhere.

A couple of the large Navy vessels at the sub base.

 

All for now...we're parked here in Brunswick for a few days, and then we'll head further north...stay tuned...