November 18, 2010 Thunderbolt, GA to St. Augustine, FL

            We prepared our boat with water and fuel for the overnight journey to St. Augustine.  We all left at noon and headed out the Wilmington River and into the Atlantic.  Timing is important as the tides and currents in the south were not what we are use to in the Chesapeake and we wanted to arrive in St. Augustine in daylight.  Wise move!
 

Sevilla and Andiamo heading out to sea

            Upon arrival in the ocean, we all noticed a round jelly fish (the size of a baseball) with a one inch red stripe around the middle of it.  We went through miles of them and then the sunset came and I was not sure when we lost them.  John and I had shrimp cocktail for an appetizer that we had purchased at B&B a few nights earlier.  Later in the evening we prepared a ham dinner and had rice and a salad.  We were well fed for our night time ocean journey.  I promptly went to sleep as John took his watch at the wheel and then I took the watch at 11pm.  During the early morning (or late evening) we saw a tanker named Horizon Trader on our AIS system.  Captain Dan from Brunelle decided to contact the tanker on the VHF to let him know that our group of four sailboats was in the area.  The captain of the tanker promptly got back to us and said we would miss each other by a mile and half.  Since it was dark and we did not have sight of the tanker other than radar and AIS, Dan decided to drop our group back to go four and a half knots and go to port by 10 degrees to make sure we missed the tanker.  (There were reasons why our speed changed during our trip  -not to mention any names - but Ragtime pops into our minds!)

            As we approached St. Augustine’s inlet, Captain Dan told us via radio how to approach the inlet and not to distract ourselves since his brother Jay and his 92 yr old mother, Mrs. Bliss, would be on the shore line taking our picture.  Don’t worry Dan, with the current and tide going in different directions, we were too busy holding on!  We were tossed around quite a bit but felt confident playing follow the leader since we were all like little ducklings behind Dan & Martha on Brunelle.  We understood that Dan was talking to Jay on the beach who was telling Dan how to handle the shoals coming in and he relayed all the messages back to the rest of us.  Thanks Dan and Jay for getting us all successfully into the channel. 

Ocean Sunset