After a 14-day trek from Maryland, it was sweet to moor Vinyasa in St. Augustine today. It was a trip with lots of highs and plenty of lows.
Our highs? We loved meeting other cruisers, were thrilled by frequent dolphin sightings, dazzled by tangerine sunsets and fiery sunrises, and awed by the early evening displays of the moon and Venus and the shifting star patterns in the night sky once the moon set.
The lows? After bad weather pinned us down on the north side of the Alligator Bridge for three days, higher than normal water levels had us anchoring for a couple of hours at midday on Tuesday waiting for the tide to drop so we could get under the Morehead City-Newport River fixed bridge.
The delay in Morehead City meant that we didn’t make it to Swansboro anchorage until after dark…and when we did, our windlass conked out as soon as we dropped the anchor.
We love our 85 pound Mantus anchor, except when pulling it up by hand is necessary! Then, as Allan deployed it by hand in Wrightsville that night, I had a horrible sense of foreboding: what if he got pulled over with it? Fortunately, he didn’t, and a rest day in Wrightsville provided Allan time to find and fix a hard-to-see broken wire.
Our two-night jump from Cape Fear to St. Augustine turned into a three-night trip, after we made an unplanned stop in Tybee, Georgia. So when we pulled in to the mooring field and grabbed our ball on the first pass, it was a much appreciated homecoming.