Skip to main content

Family Weekend

"Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up." Henry David Thoreau

This weekend my brother Mike and his daughters Megan and Brittany came down from the mountains to go sailing on Felix. The weather cooperated and we had a great weekend of sailing, fishing, and buzzing about in the dinghy. With overcast skies and 10-15 knot breezes we headed out of Jackson Creek Saturday morning and sailed into the Bay on a beam reach. Early on we caught a small bluefish while trolling a piece of squid, and sailed back and forth for a couple of hours before anchoring to spend a while bottom fishing. Mistakenly, we anchored by some charter boats, thinking they knew where the fish were, and got skunked. The girls were naturals, and seemed to take right to this boating stuff like it's in their genes.


After returning to the dock and securing Felix back in her slip, we launched our inflatable with the 15 hp outboard and took a high speed tour of the local tributaries, an exciting contrast to the relaxed sailing. Afterwards Star and the girls went to the pool for a swim while Mike The Croaker Slayer and I went back out for another, more successful, attempt at dinner. This time we drifted back and forth across a ledge right outside the creek entrance and pulled in about 15 keeper croaker which we filleted up and Chef Star baked for another fabulous, gourmet dinner.


I think every one had a great time, and we're looking forward to the next time they can all come visit again, hopefully soon. The girls took most of the pictures and video this weekend, so when some of the good ones get emailed to me I'll update this and post them here.

Comments

  1. runnermanJuly 22, 2009 at 8:05 AM

    We had a wonderful time and look forward to coming back.The food was excellent as was the company.Megan was glad she decided to come.Brittany had so much fun she had to sleep the whole way home.See you soon.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Hope you enjoy the blog, please feel free to leave comments!

Popular posts from this blog

Pine Island to Fernandina

Sunday was spent idling around the boat taking care of small projects, both of us moving a little slowly after a great time Saturday night with Fred and the acrobatic Rick from 'Freedom'. Pine Island has such a snug little anchorage it was a great place to hang out and avoid the Sunday boat traffic and we were able to scrape the waterline of 4 inch long grass and miniature barnacles that have accumulated already. Star made good on her promise of making my favorite dish after we crossed north of our starting point in St. Augustine. Lapin a la moutarde . For those like me who don't ' parlez vous ' very well, that's Rabbit in mustard sauce. Today we were underway at 7:15 heading north with a couple of stopping options available, but we were staying flexible and had no certain destination. We crossed the St. Johns River and transited the Sister's Creek area at low tide and were on a just barely rising tide for the notoriously shoaling Nassau Sound area. To say ...
5 comments
Read more

The Surreptitious Crab Pot

You can not teach a crab to walk straight . -Aristophanes 450-385 BC Travelling the waterway from South Florida up to South Carolina has taught us a lot of different things, but one of the more surprising is the art of crabbing. Having grown up on the Chesapeake, I thought I knew a thing or two about catching crabs, but apparently I didn't understand the stealth involved. You see, the crabs down here have incredible eyesight, a requirement for surviving in the murky brown waters. The local crabbers have needed to develop some especially crafty techniques for working around the blue crab and stone crab's defense mechanisms. One of the first things that a boater notices when watching these crabmen is that the proper color of the float buoy attached to the pot is critical. Bright orange or yellow are out, the crab would see those from down below in his muddy lair in an instant, and avoid the baited pot like a Congressman avoiding his conscience. Likewise red, chartreuse, or any o...
4 comments
Read more

Melbourne-Titusville-Daytona

Yesterday we sailed up to Titusville , a short 15 miles and were able to anchor by lunch. This is one of the cruisers prime Intracoastal Waterway stops . A fairly well protected anchorage right outside the Titusville Municipal Marina with a public dinghy dock, and walking distance to West Marine, Napa , grocery store, KFC , and Burger King. We took advantage of the Napa and I went ashore to fetch a gallon of anti-freeze because I had used up our onboard supply with the coolant leak . The evenings sunset entertainment was provided by the Bagpipe Guy, who seren aded the anchorage at sunset with an incredible performance. I wish I could name the tune because it was so familiar, but then a lot of bagpipe music sounds the same to my tone deaf ear. That's always one of the great pleasures of cruising, there is such an eclectic group of misfits out here all searching for their own piece of paradise. Today, we got an early jump and were underway at 7:00 under main and iron- genoa . We...
4 comments
Read more