St. Augustine

We're staying two nights here, Thursday and Friday, before heading south to Sebastian, FL. The trip into the marina on Thursday was a little too much excitement; 30/40 knot winds in a rain storm with a difficult cross current at the marina entrance. We made it safely in.

My boat handling skills must be improving; I think that I've improved from terrible to merely bad. I've backed into slips, parallel parked the boat and run marina mazes that would have defeated the average lab rat.

We spent the morning sightseeing in St. Augustine. The old fort is truly remarkable, having been built decades before Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. . Its preservation is quite good despite 500 years of usage as an active fort and as an historic location. The side bar to the visit was that I bought my Golden Age pass to enter all national parks and sites for free. There aren't many benefits to being old, but the pass, and my first Social Security check this month, are two of them.

I guess that it is a sign of our slipping into the cruiser mentality that given a choice between exotic shopping in old St. Augustine and a trip to West Marine to get stuff to repair a dingy painter and to make a kellett, West Marine came first; then, of course, Walmart for groceries.

I was talking to our neighbor in this marina and some comment I made prompted him to say that in 16 years he had over 35,000 cruising miles. At this point in the trip, along with the visit to the Chesapeake this summer, we have over 1,000 cruising miles; certainly nothing to brag about, but at least the number has a comma.