4 December 2016
Due to forecasted strong southerly winds for the foreseeable future we have decided to make our way down the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) for the rest of our trip to Ft. Pierce, Florida.
The downside is that the trip will take an extra week or more. The upside is that we have our favorite restaurants at each of the expected ports of call. Today we will he arriving in Palm Coast for our burrito and margarita/cerveza dinner.
But first we untie from the mooring ball in St. Augustine, timing our departure with the Bridge of Lions opening at 0900. The rest of the bridges today are on request, so we won’t have to rush or time anything else except the tides and currents for transiting the Matanzas Inlet with high tide which we were able to do with no issues or dramas.
We begin to see some of the carnage left behind by Hurricane Matthew which hit this area of Florida pretty hard in October. Yesterday, the water taxi driver had told us that during the storm at least 20 boats broke free from their moorings, during the surge the water was way above the seawall protecting the city. The marina across the way was demolished. Boats were found down river, beached, de-masted and/or sunk. As we motored down the canal we did indeed see a few beached boats, and many damaged private docks. 
Once though the bridge we continued on the ICW and have our first dolphin sightings — yay! Hopefully this means a lovely day on the water. A short while later we spot a manatee – double yay!
A few minutes after that we heard a “thunk” on the bottom of the boat — uh oh! We must have hit something, but there was nothing we saw in the water before or after the thud. We were in the middle of the channel, there shouldn’t be any fish traps or obstructions. We thought it might have been a sunken log, but didn’t see anything in the water.
After a bit of time, Bob noticed the boat was not going as fast as it had been or that he thought it should be given the engine RPMs. He also felt like the steering wasn’t feeling quite right. Bob said it felt like we were dragging something, but we couldn’t see anything or any evidence of this. We hoped it was only the current slowing us down.
However, better to be safe than sorry, once we arrived at Palm Coast Marina, we called a diver and arranged for him to come tomorrow morning to take a look at the bottom to be sure all is well before we continue on to Daytona Beach.
With nothing more we could do, after cleaning up, we made good on our promise to ourselves and made the 10 minute walk to European Village and shared an awesome burrito at Burrito 101 — we highly recommend this place.
Overall, the day was sunny, warm and beautiful. Other than the constant concern that the boat was not responding as usual and that the thud either caused some damage or something got caught up in the rudder, it was a lovely day.
Cabin fans are on, we are wearing shorts, t-shirts and flip flops/thongs — we are in Florida!!!! Yay for warmth. That one uncomfortable night off shore was worth it!!!