Saturday, Jsnuary 17 2009

Happy New Year!
We are now on Last Boat and beginning our trip further south to the Florida Keys.
We left Rocky Mount on Sunday, January 4. We spent the night in Myrtle Beach with Justin and Lindsey and arrived in Jacksonville, FL on Monday afternoon. We spent the nights with Nelson’s sister Loretta and her husband, Mac, but went to the boat every day for a week doing various projects to make our trip more enjoyable. We now have our dinghy out of the water on davits behind the boat. We hope this will allow our boat to go faster as the dinghy is now out of the water and hanging behind the boat in the air. This was a major project which took most of the week. The boat was as dirty as I have ever seen it when we returned due to all the construe action and road work being done near the Marina that we left her.
We had to give it a good bath before taking it anywhere.
We took Loretta, Danny, her son, and his family on a boat ride on Saturday and it was a beautiful day to be on the water. They acted as though they enjoyed their ride. We took our car back to Jacksonville when we returned and have enjoyed having it to run back and forth to the boat and do our errands before our trip south. We picked our friends from Connecticut at the airport in Jacksonville and took them to where their boat was docked in Palm Coast. It was raining all Tuesday so; we decided to wait until Wednesday to leave on the boat. We drove our car over to St. Augustine both Mon. and Tues. And looked around the town and went to a boating parts store while there. Yes, we bought something but not much. They did not have just what we needed.
Finally, Last Boat left Beach Marina on Wednesday, January 14 at 8:00a.m.
Headed to St. Augustine, Florida. We decided to ride through and on to Fort Matanzas for anchoring that night. What a neat place to anchor. Our boat was sitting right in front of the smallest little Fort I have ever seen. We did not get a chance to visit as it was closing when we arrived and we left before it opened. Our friends had anchored there before Christmas and said that we could not have carried our little boat there but had to go over to the other side of the water and ride the Ferry boat over to visit.
Maybe we can do that on our return trip. After a meal of grilled chicken, we watched American Idol and went to bed. Oh, I forgot to mention, Nelson dropped one of our pieces of chicken overboard so we had to share.
We departed around 9:30 after a big breakfast and headed south to meet our friends Chris and Marie who were further off the ICW at Palm Coast waiting for the high water to come in so they could get their boat off the bottom and away from the dock where they had left it for the Christmas Holidays. We finally found anchorage near Daytona Beach and pulled in about 3:30 and waited for our friends. They arrived just before dark. We had them over to our boat for steaks. It was great to have our traveling buddies back with us. We stayed another night there and took a long walk around the busy parts of town.
We pulled anchors this morning and traveled the ICW until we found a good anchorage called Rockhouse Creek which is near New Smyrna Beach. Ondra has another bad Bronchitis and therefore, decided to be a boat bum all day today. She is coughing and wheezing most all the time. Not a very pleasant way to be on a boat. But, she will survive.
We plan to leave here tomorrow and go more south. The weather is still cold here in Florida. We are looking for warm Florida, but have not found it yet. We are thrilled to be on the boat and going south again. Keep in touch and we will do the same.
Nelson & Ondra