anniversaries, manatees, and a little Harry Potter

 

 

It was a slower week mainly. Monday was our 2 month boating adventure anniversary, and Wednesday was our 21 year wedding anniversary. It was a nice day. Paul and I went to Jacksonville to run a few errands and had lunch together.  Then that evening, the girls surprised us by making us dinner for our anniversary  They served us out here where we were relaxing on the boat. It was super cute of them.

There isn't much else to report about the week until Saturday, and then the fun began! We woke up to 5 manatees right outside the boat.  We were very excited because we haven't hardly seen them at all this past month and to have 5 together was amazing. So yes, more manatee footage. We will never get tired of them.

 

 

 

Super cute how they kept coming up and taking turns guzzling the water.

 

 Then, we spontaneously decided to drive to Orlando to go to universal studios. We have a vacation planned to go there in September for a few days to go to universal and Sea World, and recently we noticed that an annual pass would only be 20$ more than a 4 day pass so we thought we would go a few times over the next few months when we need to kill time. So we jumped in the car and went to check it out.  We have been excited to check out the Harry Potter world because we love Harry Potter and I have even been reading the books to Noah like Paul did with Jack when he was younger. The Harry Potter world was super cool. we felt like we were really there.  It was a fun day. It was sunny and a nice break from the boat repairs and the rain we have had lately.

We have been watching tropical storm Isaac closely this past week and are now breathing easier since  it has moved away from us.  We are supposed to get more rain all this week, but the really good news is that our inverter is finally fixed, and the leaking repairs that we have had multiplying are all ok now.  That makes us happy. So if the weather gets better, now we can go somewhere, if not, we will hang out here.  We will see.

Our little home on the water

Since we are having a few rainy days and waiting on the inverter and the rain, I thought I would finally put up some pictures of our boat. I have been meaning to do this for awhile. 

This is our front door.  Pretty cool huh? Probably the only time in my life that I will have a mermaid on my front door and a lizard doorbell.  We think they are awesome! The boat came with them so we just lucked out!  And no way are we changing those awesome details. :)

 This is the salon which is the first room you step into. It is our family room, dining room, TV room, school room, etc.   It is also a handy storage area because all the seats have storage below them. We still need to get a couple pillows or new curtains and work on the decor a little.

Here is our cozy little kitchen (the galley). Microwave, sink, stove, oven, fridge/ freezer; it has all the basics in mini form. The fridge/freezer is found when you lift the big counter on the left. Pretty handy.

So if you go down the stairs to the left you first come to Paul and Kate's room. It is in the port aft cabin (back left).  We are the only lucky ones with a TV in our bedroom- one of the few perks of being the mom and dad :). Basically a bed, closet, bench, and a little under bed storage.

Go down the hall and you next come to the head (bathroom). It is a little hard to take pics because of the narrow door, but I tried. The bathroom has a cool ocean view hatch huh? When we are out in the ocean the water is so much prettier.

After the head is a hallway with another bench and closet and then you come to our pantry and extra freezer.  A previous owner converted the usual bedroom here to the shelves and freezer and we like that for feeding the six of us. Also, behind the little door is more storage space.

So if you go down to the right (starboard side) you first find Lucy and Emily's room.

It is set up the same as the other side with a hallway, bathroom, and then we come to Jack's room.  Beyond that you can see Mr. Noah's cute little room when the door is open between them.

Now for a close up of Noah's cute little room. It goes to the very front of the boat - that is why it is getting narrower.  It works out good for Noah.

That is basically it. The cockpit has lots of seating and a table which gives us more space and we can climb/walk/sit on all the other outside parts of the boat so that helps when we need a little space too.

  Of course the hammock in the cock pit is also one of our very favorite areas to hang out. 

August 13-18 A little fishing

Another week. Sometimes it seems like it goes fast, and sometimes it seems like it is taking so long to wait until storm season will be over and we can head out for good.  We try to find new things to do here and the boat keeps us busy with fix up and clean up projects all the time.  Throw in the laundry and homeschool normal stuff and overall we have plenty to do, but are excited for the day when we really get to head out.  This week we have hung around here, still working on getting the inverter fixed and that will continue into next week so we took a couple of fun breaks too.  We went to the GTM National Estuarine Research Reserve and learned about estuaries -since this waterway right here is an estuary. That was a cool little museum. Now we know why we haven't seen any Right whales- they are only here from December to March-Dec so we won't get to see them. 

On Wed. we went on the ward Temple trip to the Orlando Temple and that was fun. That afternoon, while still in Orlando, we decided to go to a movie. We haven't been to a movie theater in many months-can't remember when. Since we are on a budget, we have avoided the theaters in St. augustine because movies are $12 or $8 for a matinee, Yikes! So we found a dollar theater in Orlando and saw the Pirate adventure movie -we are fans of clay-mation and of the pirate adventure books, so it was cute. Amazing how excited the kids were to see a dollar movie-it honestly has been forever since we made it to a theater.

Now for some boat fun!

Finally some boat action.  After talking to some people and getting all the gear we were ready to try out some ocean fishing.  We had a lot of fun. We left early Friday morning and headed out to 9 mile reef.  Yes, it is about 9 miles straight out (East) from the inlet. We barely put in the first line and immediately caught..... a SHARK!  The kids were super excited and it was kind of funny. We think it was an atlantic sharp nose- about 3 feet long.  So we let it go, with our hook sadly, and a few minutes later we proceeded to catch another shark--it looked identical.  Still funny, but now we were a little worried because we really didn't want to waste all our hooks.  We tried a few different spots and then started catching sea bass.  They were really cool looking but a little too small to keep -usually about 10 inches.  Overall our total for the day was 3 sharks and 7 sea bass.  There wasn't any wind so we did not get to sail, but the fishing was fun.  The water was so calm, the calmest we have ever seen it. No dolphins today but we did see a HUGE sea turtle and tons of jellyfish hanging out where we were fishing. It was a fun day and we will definitely try that again.

Cumberland Island, Georgia

To begin, it's not my fault it took me so long this time. No internet for the past week--no internet or TV at the island, and then the internet has been out at the marina since we got back, so I am hanging out at the library today to catch up on the internet stuff.

Our first real sailing excursion began early Monday morning Aug 6.  It took about 10 hours to get to Cumberland Island, GA.  Yes it was only around 51 miles, but when you are going 5-7 knots an hour, that is how it works out.  It went really well. The first several hours we had to motor because there wasn't enough wind but then it started to pick up and we pulled out the spinaker and got to sail a few hours before arriving to this great island. No one got sick although it was kind of hard to do school and stuff.  When you are swaying, it doens't really make reading and math and stuff very easy.  We will work on it.  Since it was a long day without a lot of other things to do we could just do small amounts of school work with lots of breaks.  Lots of naps happened too.  Paul and I were glad that the autopilot works well so even though we need to be out watching all the time, we don't have to steer the wheel constantly.

Lucy took a picture of us as we were putting up the spinaker. I am just finishing hoisting it with the winch and then Paul is taking the sail out from the sock and we are ready for the action.

So I might say this a lot, but since this is our first big excursion, I can really mean it. This island is our favorite yet!  It is so beautiful.  It has beautiful huge oak trees, lush plants, beautiful white sand dunes, and a big, nice, quiet beach. 

We really enjoyed walking around and exploring the island.  The only thing we didn't love were the mosuitoes and bugs. Whenever we were on the island we had to keep moving and waving our arms, even with lots of bug spray on. Luckily we didn't have that problem on the boat.  Since it is anchored, it keeps us away from the bugs.

This island was where the Carnegies lived and resorted in the early 1900's. We got to tour this home called the Plum Orchard Mansion. It was really cool. 

Another thing we love about this island is the wild horses and deer all over the place.  We walked by them all the time.  We also saw dolphins in the waterway where we were anchored several times during the week.

These are the ruins of Dungeness. This was the big main house of the Carnegies and it was burned down many years later.  The house must have been pretty cool because even the ruins were really pretty.

Of course we had to do a little frog catching. Super cute.

We decided to head back on Thursday because that day looked the best for winds and stuff.  Everyday for the past week or two we seem to get a thunderstorm in the afternoon so we can't really avoid those.  We knew we would be going against the wind whichever day because the winds have been south-southeast for the past couple of weeks. The day went well for the most part. We saw some dolphins and a cute big sea turtle floating out in the middle of nowhere.  When we were getting close to the inlet to come home a big thunderstorm came up really quickly.  It was bad timing because we were trying to watch for the channel markers and buoys and for other ships and the rain made our visibility pretty bad. There was lots of lightning that we didn't love either.  So it was a little stressful but we made it to the channel and the storm blew over fairly quickly.  The afternoon thunderstorms are nice to cool us off a lot lately but this past few days the lightning is really close and since we are in a boat, that can be scary at times. Overall, our first big trip was a success and we really enjoyed it.  Of course there were new boat problems: a leak in the hatch above Noah's bed, and our inverter that converts our  DC power to AC when we are not hooked up to the shore power stopped working while at the island.  There are new things to fix and work on every week.  Everyone says that is  how boats are, we hope that isn't really the case every week!

August, really?

Can't believe it is August.  Strange.  Starting to see commercials for back to school sales and it all seems strange not to be doing that.  And now it is official.  We are now a homeschooling family.  We decided that since we aren't so busy with boat stuff and the kids are feeling pretty settled it was time to start school.  So we started on Monday, July 30.  I think our first week went ok.  It is taking a little adjusting to get used to sitting still and focusing on stuff, but I could tell an improvement later in the week.  It is a big new change...again.

Tues and Wed were pretty rainy afternoons.  That didn't slow Noah down.  He just put on his rainjacket and kept on with playing with his crab buddies.  Tuesday was a record setting day for him. He caught 8 crabs in one day and he and Lucy caught this big whopper, by far the biggest catch so far. The ones he usually catches range from 1/2 inch to a couple of inches- just cute little guys but this one was ginormous! I didn't dare even suggesting eating it though, they are his friends.

Later this week we took a couple of field trips to a museum and to this fort called - The Castillo de San Marcos.  The kids were studying about St. Augustine this week so we thought it would be fun to go see this awesome fort. 

And yes we got to do some sailing practise this week.  This is the spinaker sail and it works really well.  It is much easier to manage and adjust than the mainsail and works well for light to medium winds.  And good news- no one got sick this time too. We stayed out several hours and when we were heading back in we came upon a group of dolphins.  I tried to video but it was all happening too fast. They were just popping up all over- some just 10 feet away others 30-50 ft, just randomly coming up.  They were really cool.

I thought I would take a quick video so we can remember this marina we now call home. 

 We have really liked it here so far.