St. Johns River, JAX to Palatka

Before we continue our Great Loop trip, we've decided to take a side trip up the St. Johns River.  "Up" the river actually means "south" from here or "down" Florida as the St. Johns is one of the few rivers in the US that runs north.  So, keep that in mind any time I refer to our direction of movement.  

And before we leave, meet our friends from Alabama, Bob and Barbara Hopson.  We met them many years ago at Lindsay Lane Baptist Church at which time they noted that they were boaters and kept their sailboat at Bay Hill Marina.  Guess what, Bay Hill Marina is home port also to "Help Me Rhonda" and where we have our condo on the TN River, so a match was made and we've been friends ever since.  We've traveled by boat and car together and played many games of dominoes in between.  This picture was actually taken 4 days from now at Blue Springs but we'll use it now to introduce our friends and guests for this portion of our trip.

From Harbortown Marina on the ICW to the St. Johns River is 5 miles, then another 163 miles to our destination up the river, Sanford.  Here's the junction of the ICW and the river, mile marker "1."

The first major landmark heading upstream is Dames Point Bridge on I-295.

The cruise ship and container ship docks were empty.  I guess all of the cruise ships were broken down somewhere!

Rhonda and Barbara were doing a fine job getting us to downtown JAX.  In case you are wondering why Rhonda has a kangaroo-looking thing named Gowalla on her hoodie, that's the company our older son, Adam, worked for before Facebook bought it out.  Rather than move to CA to work for Facebook, he decided to stay in Austin and now works for a pretty cool company called "Map My Fitness."

Here's The Gator Bowl on our starboard side, also home to the Jacksonville Jaguars.

And, downtown JAX ahead.  

JAX has three major bridges across the St. Johns River, all painted a different color - red, green, and blue.

Jacksonville Landing downtown, all in all a beautiful riverfront city.

Our first stop on the river was Green Cove Springs, about 44 miles upstream.  Don't forget - we're heading south "up" the river.  The city has a very nice riverfront park and it was packed on a Sunday, St. Patrick's Day weekend, but we had the docks pretty much to ourselves.

The centerpiece of the park is the actual spring from which the town gets its name.  

The water flows from the spring through the park and into the St. Johns.

Lots of very nice facilities for all types of activities including playgrounds for the kids and a great setting on the river.

We took a quick walking tour of the city and noted many really pretty churches.  This one was our favorite - St. Mary's Episcopal, also right on the riverfront.

We grilled burgers on the boat for dinner, got in our first dominoes contest of the trip, and prepared for day two to our next stop, Palatka.  I should note that the "lower" half of the river is mostly open water which surprised Rhonda.  She was expecting a narrow river the entire trip.  We docked at Boathouse Marina which is located right downtown in Palatka.  Most of the marinas from this point up river are let's say "rustic" but we kind of like that.

There are literally small cruise ships that provide tours of the St. Johns. We passed one on our right approaching the marina. Here she sits with a full moon later in the evening.

Shortly after docking, we got a phone call from two of the passengers, John and Judy Gill.  They saw our looper flag, looked up our info on the looper website, and called us to say hello.  They made the loop trip around 2004.  We walked over and visited with them for a few minutes before heading in to town.  It's always fun to meet fellow loopers since all of us members are interested in the same thing and have lots to share about our individual travels and experiences.

Our first stop in town was Angelo's Diner, claiming the famed status of "Florida's Oldest Diner."  Not sure exactly how they got a railroad dining car to downtown put it's there and "famous" to boot. 

Palatka has numerous wall paintings on the sides of their corner buildings downtown.  Here are a few and yes, the last one is a tribute to Billy Graham. 

As we were checking out the town, we checked out possibilities for dinner.  While checking out the menu at an Italian Restaurant, Rhonda also asked what there was to do in the town.  After a quick perusal of our group and without hesitation, the guy said there was a gun range a few blocks away. That was his only recommendation for us so not sure if that was a statement about us or the town!  Anyway, here's the gun range.  

Palatka has a very pretty riverfront with the clock tower as a focal point.

The city has a very defined historic district with lots of churches like Green Cove Springs and many beautiful homes.  The historic district is defined by cobblestone/brick streets. 

We finished our walking tour, DID NOT GO TO THE GUN RANGE, and headed back to the boat.  Since Rhonda had not had much of a chance for a bike ride yet on her new bike, we took a riding tour of the town and found a very pretty cemetery on the south side of town.  Most of the tombstones noted birth dates in the early to mid 1800s and lots of deaths in the mid 1800s, particularly newborn babies and young children.  Rhonda was in tears before we left and it was truly sad to understand and realize how common this was in those days.  We are blessed to live in an era with so much medical technology and advances in healthcare available to us.

For dinner, we decided not to hold a grudge against the Italian restaurant's gun range recommendation and returned there for dinner.  It was the number one recommendation by everyone we asked and it really was good.  My number one all-time favorite soup is clam chowder (and I sample it every chance I get), followed closely by Olive Garden's pasta e fagiole, but there's new competition for those after "pizza soup" from "Viva! Italia Pizzeria."  Outstanding.

No dominoes that night, just conversation and enjoying our friends aboard.  Big day to Georgetown in the morning.  Gonna see some gators, all kinds of bird activity, and some beautiful scenery as the river narrows and we enter some of Florida's most undeveloped land.

On The Move Again, Leaving JAX Tomorrow

Well, our 2 months in Jacksonville have come and gone.  It has been crazy busy.  In addition to lots of work on the boat (mostly me), there were lots of visits with Rhonda's family (mostly Rhonda, but I did get a few in with her).  We had one last get-together at "Time Out" on Thursday with the family.  Here's the crew including left to right - Deanna, Jessica, "G" and Poppa, Kelly, Keith, and Tony. 

On top of all of that, we managed to get in a car trip back to our land-home in AL.  Got taxes done and visited with Scott and Rachel.  We sold the car yesterday since we won't need a car again now for at least 6 or 7 months, so we're back to moving by boat, walking, and bicycles again. Never liked that car anyway. Scott and Rachel moved our truck back to AL from Gulf Shores a few weeks ago, so we'll have a vehicle when we get back to Alabama. 

We had a nice visit also a couple of weeks ago with some email "pen pals" that we had actually never met, Don and Teresa Bolls.  Here's how we "sort of met."  We were at a New Year's Eve party with a bunch of our church friends in Muskogee, OK about 5 years ago and our associate pastor, Don Jones, mentioned to me that he had some friends that were getting close to retirement and were considering living on a boat and he asked if he could share our email with them.  Well of course I did not mind!  Don and I communicated a good bit initially and then we lost touch for a while during our stay in Galveston.  Then I got a new email from Don a few weeks ago - they had retired and were in FL visiting some friends, so we made plans to get together here in JAX.  We had a wonderful visit for an afternoon and then went to dinner at a local seafood restaurant.  Don and Teresa have opted for travel by RV rather than boat but I guess we'll still be friends!!!!

The really special story about Don and Teresa is that they are retiring from being missionaries in Niger for 30 years.  It is always interesting and fascinating to hear the stories of missionary experiences.  Theirs is particularly interesting as they approached the departure time from Niger which was during the uprisings and fall of Libya, next-door neighbor to Niger. But certainly more important was the impact they were able to have on the people in Niger through Don's work with irrigation/farming/installing latrines and Teresa's work with women/midwives and developing a "storybook" of their own for sharing the gospel to so many.  We look forward to continuing our communication with Don and Teresa and wish them the best in their RV retirement.

I managed to get most of my "to-do" list done.  Finished up 6 new coats of varnish on all of the exterior teak yesterday.  It's all nice and shiny again and should give us enough protection from the summer UV rays until we get back to a covered dock at our home marina on the TN River.

And Rhonda finally decided to get a new bike - her old one was 25 years old.  Yes, we realized that it was yellow, pink, and white before we bought it.  Should not be hard to spot this one in a crowd, huh? 

Rhonda's Dad came by this morning to drive her to the bank to deposit the proceeds from selling the car.

And lastly, we have a special treat in store for us this next leg of our trip.  Our boating/church/dominoes friends from AL, Bob and Barbara Hopson, are en route as I type to join us for our trip down the St. Johns River before we continue up the Atlantic Coast. They are long-time sailboaters and recently sold their Westerly, so it will be good for them to be on the water again and good for us to get to spend some time with them.  Here's a pic of "Discoverer" from a fall TN River trip we made with them to Chattanooga a few years ago.

And a group shot at the carousel across the river from where we were docked.

So, it's been fun but time to move on.  The boat is pointed out of the slip and ready to go.  We'll be in touch!

Update From JAX, FL

We've been in Jacksonville one month now.  Just thought we would check in and say hello to our friends and family who are following the blog.  On that topic, we've had a pretty good bit of interest in the blog - 7,125 views since we started it 5 years ago when we left AL on our 41' Roughwater heading to Muskogee, OK to manage a marina on the Arkansas River.  Of course, most of that is the same friends and family checking in on a regular basis who are particularly interested in our daily travels and progress, but we also get lots of interest from other boaters that we do not know.  We regularly follow several of our boater friends' blogs and sometimes we'll check out a blog that helps us plan some of our travels.  As an example, we've been reading some bloggers' accounts of traveling the St. Johns River out of Jacksonville south to Sanford.  It looks like a really nice trip so we're making plans to do that before we leave Jacksonville heading north in the spring.  

I had previously covered some details on the marina here at Harbortown when we first arrived.  Here's a shot from the bridge over the ICW.  Development of the vacant lot in the foreground will begin in May to include more marina facilities and residential units of some sort.

The ICW winds its way through here with 2 full tide changes per day (2 lows and 2 highs per day) of about 4 to 5 feet between highs and lows.  

So what do we do all the time?  Well, obviously we've been visiting a lot with Rhonda's family.  We're also trying to keep up our bike riding pace but Rhonda is doing a better job than me!  She's made several trips by bike to her parents' home which is about 5 miles one way.  We rode them out to the beach one afternoon which is about 3 1/2 miles one way.  Jacksonville (Neptune Beach) has a very nice walking beach.

The sea gulls look about the same here as everywhere else but I like playing with the camera!

This was an interesting photo-op our first trip out to the beach.  I assume it's relevant to The Jacksonville Jaguars - I've seen at least one other one since then with a different color scheme.

I've spent most of my time getting work projects completed on the boat.  Some of it has been routine stuff like changing filters and belts, cleaning strainers, and an occasional repair like a faulty breather on the starboard engine injector pump.  But most of my time has been occupied by some larger projects.  

When we bought the boat in Corpus, half of the sound shield for the generator was missing.  Guess what - the remaining half doesn't do much good without the other half! Duh. So, after listening to the noise of a generator more times than we wanted to in the past 3 months, I decided to build a new one.  After lots of measuring and planning, here's what I came up with.

It's 1/2 inch plywood built in 5 sections that snap together, with cutouts for incoming/outgoing lines and additional cutouts for air intake, heat/fumes venting, and access to check fluids.  The inside is lined with one - inch sound proofing material.  The key part of the planning was how to get the above into the generator room and mounted around the generator.  As anyone who has ever owned a boat knows, there's not much room to work with.  Here's the challenge area!

And here she is after much maneuvering and getting this almost-60-year-old body into positions and spaces I wasn't sure I would be able to get out of!

The good news is that my body has recovered and the sound shield works great - much quieter now!  

My next project was to strip and varnish the teak sliding door and frame on the starboard side.  A little history - every piece of teak on this boat (and there's a lot of it) except for a little bit on the back deck had been painted with white paint before we bought it.  I have personally stripped and varnished all the teak and she is starting to look really nice with all the teak accents on board.  I had planned to have all of it done before we left Galveston but my medical summer of last year put me about 4 months behind schedule.  Two months in Jacksonville is a good time to try and get caught up. Here's before.

And after, with 6 coats of varnish so far.  I normally do 10 to 14 coats by the time I finish - waiting on warm weather again.

Project #3 - remove some old and very thick non-skid add-on surface material that had seen better days, probably about 25 years ago.  This before pic does not do the ugliness justice!

It was on both sides of the boat at the access points to the walk-around deck.  While this is still not complete either (waiting on warmer weather), I've at least gotten the old up, made repairs to the deck, and gotten a coat of primer on.

Project #4 - replace chartplotter and radar.  Some more history - we bought the boat with an antiquated chartplotter and radar.  The radar worked great and we were able to navigate just fine with the old chartplotter and two sets of electronic charts on our IPAD and laptop.  Then the radar died and it's expensive to repair the old technology, even if you can find the parts.  Most radar displays these days are linked to the chartplotter display so we decided to update both.  After much painstaking research time to get caught up on the latest technology, we ended up with a new Garmin 740s and a Garmin 18 HD Radar.  I had a professional to do the installation to be sure it was done correctly and I can highly recommend Buddy Dean with Dean Marine Electronics.  To cut down on costs, I did most of the prep work, pulling old equipment out and preparing for the new.  I also had to relocate the TV antenna dish.  Here's before on the outside.

And after.

Here's the new chartplotter display at the upper helm.  It's pretty cool - you can have all chart or radar, split the screen for both, or overlay the radar on the chart.  There are lots of other functions as well, too many to mention, gonna take me a while to learn all new stuff.

We have never used the lower helm before but anticipate using it a lot as we travel north into the Great Lakes and Canada.  So, we added the capability to move the chartplotter display to the lower helm.  Since we had no depth info at the lower station, we also added sonar capability for downstairs which will also display simultaneously with the charts and radar.

I've still got 17 things on my "to-do" list so I doubt I'll get them all done before it's time to move again.  But at least some of the bigger jobs are done.  And since it can't be all work and no play, I managed to get out once on the boat with my brother-in-law, Tony, and we took a spin in his 340 SeaRay Sundancer another day.  Rhonda and I want to get new boat cards made up which will reduce my to-do list to 16 items.  Traveling boaters swap boat cards like business folks swap business cards.  Rhonda took some pics for us and we're considering this shot for the new cards.  WDYT?

We are still waiting on passports for Canada and have lots more trip planning to do.  So, we'll keep working on projects, hang out with the family, sightsee a little bit, and get ready to head out again in late March or so.    See you at the next post.