February 24, 2007

Last night while I was getting ready to anchor which I do by finding a spot with about five to six feet of water and then circle around it to determine if the level is pretty much the same all over. I noticed that a mega yacht of probably 80 or more feet was coming wide open up the waterway. With my anchor light on I thought surely he will slow down before passing me. I looked over my shoulder and what do I see but the bow wave which looks to be eight high bearing down on me and I am in the position that I am going to surf toward shore which is not good and the other is I could lose control of the boat. In seconds it hit and I found myself going for a ride I won’t forget and the next thing I know I am high and dry on a sand bar a few feet from shore, good news, its sand bad news, how will I ever get off there. Also bad news is that when this happened the motor was running and trying to dig a hole in the sand, this blocked the hole that allows water to continuously cool the engine, so I immediately shut it off. Now I have two things to recover from and at the moment don’t know how to deal with either. I thought of another thing and that was the tide. I got out my computer and checked the tide chart and I am at low tide and that meant that at about 0600 in the morning I would have two and one half more feet of water under. Now I had to worry about the motor situation so out came the book of instructions and it says to flush motor with fresh water and try to run it to see if water pump is still working. Fine idea but I don’t have anything to flush with so I consider calling Boat US for a tow. Next I thought Mike at Three Rivers said if I ever needed help call him and so for one last try before a tow I called Mike. Well if I ever needed his help it was now. He said take the washdown hose and hold it tight against the fitting and turn it on and flush it backwards and see if anything happened and that I could run the motor slow if that didn’t work for a while to get me off the bar and re-anchor in deeper water. I tried it and his genius came through, I guess I didn’t ruin anything and the motor started and the water came flowing out. Oh Lord, was I a relieved man. I can’t thank him enough for his help cause I really was up a creek.

Once I got under way and made sure everything was working okay by going slow for a couple of miles and no weird sounds I started off for the day. Leaving Wilbur-by-the Sea behind and going up the rest of the Halifax River and then across a cut and into the Matanzas River I passed some beautiful areas, some wide areas and some more of the narrow and marshy land which I have grown to like so well. I can see all of the wild life as I go by on one side and on the other the older Florida homes of the past, moss on the trees, etc. I was just really enjoying myself and I look out the back and here comes by the same guy from last night and I swear I am going to go through the same thing again. I went surfing down his wake and I knew it was going to end so I did a quick turn back up and over the wake and guess what it worked, whew, this is hard work. I got a few more like that during the day but survived all and now I am sitting inside the harbor at St. Augustine, Florida right by the fort and just on the north side of the Bridge of Lions which is famous here. Right now it is quiet in the bay and I am close to the streets above me and can see the fort now at night. When it is quiet and nice like this it is really heavenly but all of the other things I put up with during the day, I sometimes wonder if I will see the sunset. But the good of the day overpowers the bad and I give thanks I am still here to continue another day of this great adventure. I’ve seen so much beauty like coming up the Tolmato River in water that was 30 feet deep at times and just a hundred yards away and right on the edge of the channel at times a field of grass filled with herons and egrets that looked like you could reach out and touch them. And those giant white pelicans that I would like to see fly because they just waddle around on land and look so graceful when they fly. I probably have seen more of the backside of America already than all of the driving could ever do. I love to share the richness of the good and take the bad with a grain of salt. From here I can see the train of lights in the water marking the channel out of the inlet at St. Augustine and that would certainly be another adventure waiting for one if you took off for the horizon. This motorcycle week in Daytona and up and down the coast I have been hearing that familiar thunder of a Harley Davidson including that throaty roar. Last night I panicked as I kept hearing this constant roar and then I looked at my map and figured out I was only probably 200 yards from the Atlantic Ocean and that roar was the surf which during the day at one particular point I saw coming higher than the dunes that separated me from the Atlantic