08.30 in the morning and Darryl & Lynne are the first to show for our bon voyage ‘recuperatives’, which was just as well as Darryl had pre-cooked the bacon for our butties!!!! For those of you who have not experienced the Little Ship Club traditional recuperatives, it consists of Bacon Butties (as we were in the States we had BLT’s instead) and Buck’s Fizz (known as Mimosas in the States) and usually follows an evening of heavy drinking and partying!!!

By 09.00 we had quite a few of our friends from the FAC (Friday Afternoon Club) on board. There was Richard, Claude, Dick, Peggy & Danny, Barry & Barbara (and their friend whose name I can’t remember ….sorry). It was very touching to have such a good send off though we do suspect they wanted to make sure we went!!!!!  Capt’n Rog was very forceful and kicked everyone off at 09.30 precisely, in order that we caught the high tide as Beaujolais no longer has a 6’8” draft. No, it’s now more like 7’. The downside of this was that unfortunately Doug Rosen and his girlfriend Sherri missed us by ten minutes, together with the coffee and Danish thy had brought to send us off. However, he assures us everyone on the dock ate well, sorry about that guys but as you know, the tide will decide!

So it was that we slipped the lines and waved goodbye to new friends and old and sailed off not into the sunset, but into the unknown!. Unknown not just because we had no fixed plans, but because the fog was so thick you couldn’t see more than a 100 metres.

It was quite surreal, so quiet and with no real visibility, bridges would just magically appear in front of you. A little disconcerting, but never the less it was lovely.

We motored (thank god we put the new engine in last year…thanks Joel Stuart) the 25 miles down river to the St. John’s river entrance at Mayport and tied up at the Jacksonville Marina (formerly known as Mayport Marina, but now under new and very keen, management).

Having been given the ‘heads up’ on how rough the swell can be, we tucked in behind the outside pontoon and sidled up alongside, ably assisted by 4 dock hands who literally man handled us in. We had also been warned about the current that runs there and with Beaujolais’ long keel we couldn’t have managed it by ourselves.

Darryl & Lynne tootled down in ‘The Merceeeeedeeeees’ to join us for the evening which was spent having a very good and inexpensive seafood dinner at Singletons, followed by many drinks on board. Lynne & I left Roger and Darryl to it as they spent the wee small hours putting the world to rights, again. You would have thought that they would have sorted it all out by now!