Fernandina Beach, Florida, 5 July 2016, 30:40.237N 081:28.131W

Five Islands
John & Sue
Sat 6 Aug 2016 21:29
After only a few hours sleep we let the mooring go and headed north once again. We motored under 7 fixed 65’ bridges, through 1 open railway bridge and through 1 bascule opening bridge.  The current was fairly strong yet again and some of the areas of the waterway had shoaled and were not clearly marked. The depth sounder showed 0.0m at one point which was more than a little disconcerting. 

More pink birds

More fishermen

More large country estate homes

The bascule bridge at Sister’s Creek with the fixed bridge behind. We always get a little concerned when we see cranes working on bridges, but this one was fine but the current made passing between the bridge fenders a little interesting.

Fernandina Beach Marina. The big girl at the dock was ‘Freedom’ who was still at the dock in St Augustine when we left this morning. She’d obviously done a quick hop up the coast in the time it had taken us to slowly motor our way up the ICW. 

After mooring we took the dinghy to the marina and couldn’t believe the mud. It was low tide and several boats and docks were sitting on the mud, high and dry. We manoeuvred toward the dinghy dock and got stuck in the mud. Using the oars to free ourselves successfully coated them in thick, sticky grey mud which proved fairly difficult to remove. The guy in the office was extremely friendly but had a really broad southern drawl so I had to ask him to repeat  himself several times and I think he was having some problems trying to understand us. Interesting we all speak English but still have difficulty understanding the different accents.

Shrimp boats in for the night.

There are 2 large factories opposite the mooring field one of which is a paper mill, we think, as we could see stockpiles of wood chip/sawdust. 

Yet another late afternoon storm

Although not terribly attractive during the day, the paper mill is pretty by night.