December 17, 2015 38th wedding anniversary in FL

sunrise

Happy 38th Anniversary for us!  I made us a nice “anniversary breakfast” while Dave made the boat ready to leave the anchorage.  We hadn’t decided where to spend the night, at anchor or in St Augustine.  We decided that we would rather keep moving south since Friday looked like we would have bad weather. 

So we moved right on past St Augustine.  Passing the inlet and waiting for the Bridge of Lions to open on the half hour can be tricky because of the strong current.  Luckily, there weren’t any other boats waiting for the opening with us.  It can feel like a bunch of cars in a Shrine Circus parade trying to wait in a channel. 

We decided to go to the Active Captain app and leave a review of the anchorage last night so others would avoid the confusion that we experienced.  Active Captain is a wonderful app that every boater should use.  It gives you up to date information about anchorages, hazards, marinas, ect, with peoples opinions.  We were using the Active Captain data on our Garmin Bluechart Mobile App.  So I went to the original Active Captain app to leave a review.  Well on their site, we saw lots of other comments that would have saved us all the trouble last night.  Sooooo, I sent a message to the Active Captain Facebook page asking about the differences in Garmin vs their app.  It was nice to get a response from them so quickly.  We had recently upgraded both of these apps, but they thought something must not have been completed, because their Garmin matched their site. 

So we decided to use our data plan (since we didn’t have a wifi to use) and re download the Active Captain on our Garmin Bluechart Mobile app.  We use this all the time and wanted it to be accurate.   Once this was complete on both of our phones, everything showed up as it should.  Hurray!!  Funny how maybe you should check out those things before you leave the marina.

We continued down the ICW about 15 more miles (about 3 hours) passed St Augustine to Matanzas Inlet.  We had anchored here before and were anchored by 3:30.  We planned to have a nice dinner on the boat for our anniversary. 

Dave went to work right away getting our water maker running.  It had been “pickled” for 6 months while we were at the marina.  You never know what parts will or won’t work.  And we had a new pump since we last used it.  We didn’t want to run it back at the marina because the water wouldn’t have been very clean, and it would have made the filters filthy.  Everything ran great.  And the water here tested as some of the cleanest we have seen.

We decided to start our steak dinner, but found out one of the steaks was still frozen.  So we went to plan B.  We’ll grill the steaks tomorrow and make our second favorite meal, Mexican, tonight.  We ran the generator for about an hour, filling our water tanks.  We found a local wifi we could pick up, so did some catching up on e-mails and Facebook. 

After eating and cleaning up after dinner, we each took showers.  That was the high light of the day for us.  Boy have our priorities changed.  We played a game of cards and called it a night.  We were both tired from our events of the night before.