Sailing to Georgia

 

The time to leave Florida had arrived so Paul and the kids left the marina late afternoon on Sat, Oct. 20. I, sadly, didn't get to sail with them because I had to drive the car up to Georgia. I stayed with a friend that night and drove up the next morning since it is only a two hour drive. Paul and the kids sailed all night and arrived to St. Simon's Island late Sunday morning. I was so proud of them!  They sailed 17 hours straight-through the night.  They rotated night watches (Paul and Lucy together, then Jack and Emily) every three hours.  I feel kind of jealous.  I think it sounds pretty amazing (and a little scary to be honest) to be out in the ocean in the middle of the night. They took lots of awesome pictures as they watched the sun set.  They also saw a huge manta ray jumping out of the water a few times and I was a little jealous again. Who knew manta rays jumped out of the water?

 

Yikes. living on the edge

 

 

 

It's getting darker...

and darker...

 

pretty moon

 

They hung out in the cockpit most of the time and even splept a lot of the time there. They said it got pretty cold.  How cute and cuddly is this?

This is our new spot in Georgia. St. Simons Island, GA (just a few minutes from Brunswick). This is the Golden Isles Marina.  It is really pretty here.  Look closely and you can see the gang at the BBQ pavillion. We had a yummy little BBQ picnic.  Challenge for the day: can you pick out our catamaran in the picture? Yes, it is very hard to see but is possible. :)

 

 

 

Last days in Florida

 

Time to catch up again.  Here is the past week and a half in the life of the Coltons.  We went to visit another fort -Ft. Matanzas. It is just south of St. Augustine and it is a small fort, but we really liked it. It is on a little island (Rattlesnake Island--no we didn't see any snakes) so we got to ride a little ferry over to it as part of the tour. It was cool.

 

 

Ferry ride to the fort.

 

 

Cannons at a fort are always a bonus.

 

 

Some other misc. stuff happening for our last week in Florida.  The kids decided to have a sleepover outside in the cockpit.  They liked it so much that they had to do it a second night. 

 

 

Then, of course Noah wanted to do school in the sleeping bag and I thought well, if it will motivate him and he will have fun then why not. A perk to homeschooling huh? Anything to make schoolwork a little funner.

 

 

And of course, Noah had the idea to make the cockpit into a fort. Kids can make anything into a fort!

 All you need is a few clothespins, a towel, and ta-da!

 

More miscellaneous: the latest hobby has been Harry Potter.  Since I have been reading the books to the kids, Noah started playing Harry Potter and his nice sisters joined in.  Here they are with their coolest wand poses.

 

 

This is them hanging out in the whomping willow. This is an awesome tree that Noah loves to hang out in.

 

They have been having various Hogwarts classes for their harry potter playtime. This one was Care of Magical creatures- a few crabs hanging out in the mud worked well for that class.

 

 

You can't read the papers sadly, but they say that this is the wand shop. We all got to buy awesome wands from Noah and then the kids spent lots of time running around casting spells on each other.  They have had a ton of fun and it was a good diversion.

 

 

Another diversion.  This weekend there was a big sailfish tournament at our marina.  LOTS of big, fancy fishing boats came into town for this big fishing contest.  It has been busy and bustling here.  We woke about 5:45 am both Friday and today to the big boats heading out for the fishing fun. Then they come back to the marina around 5 pm . It is like watching a parade coming by. There were 26 boats involved.  It was fun to watch them.

 

If you can tell, the small white flag on the right is what they put up if they caught a sailfish that day.  It has a picture of a blue sailfish on the flag.  We would count the flags as they came by to see how many each boat caught that day.

 

This boat caught the most for the day--5 flags.  There were also prizes for catching mahi mahi and wahoo too.  It was cool to see some of the fish they caught when they were cleaning them.  The sailfish are catch and release only so they measure the fish and take pictures before they release them, but the other fish were cool to see. It sure has been busy around our marina lately.

 

 

So, finally, the time has come to say goodbye to Florida. Our permit to be here expires soon, so the plan is to go up to Georgia, get the boat settled there, and wait one more month while hurricane season finally finishes up. Then we will head to the Bahamas.  That is the current plan anyway.  It has been a crazy few weeks with kinks coming up with both our short term and long term boat plans and it has made us a bit crazy.  Some days we are ready to leave for the Bahamas now and get on with it, other days we are ready to sell this crazy boat.  It has had its challenges, but has been so amazing too.  So I will end this post with a few more random pictures of St. Augustine that will remind us of the wonderful memories of this place. By the way, the people here are wonderful. Everyone here has made us feel so at home and even though we feel like it is time to move on, it was a little sad to go today too. 

 

 

 I finally have a couple of pictures of all of us on the boat. Yea!

 

We love this crazy motel.  We went by it whenever we walked to the beach and we thought it was very unique and awesome! It doesn't make sense decoratively with the magic hat and rabbits and then there are flamingos by the room doors, but it is a one-of-a-kind.

 

Yes, it is very scary, but I don't want to forget my crazy, wild hair. It has been rather entertaining at times to see what the humidity will do to my hair. This humidity has been one of our bigger adjustments.  The way everything feels damp and you have to put everything (gum, crackers, anything crunchy, paper) in baggies or it gets soggy, so different from Utah.

 

We will never forget the amazing wildlife here in Florida.  That has been our favorite thing. The turtles, birds, fish, dolphins, manatees, etc.  We love it all. 

 Now on to the fun in Georgia.

 

 

cool weather, cool kids

 

How pretty is this!  The sky, clouds, and water were this amazingly dark pink and it was

 too pretty to ignore. This was on Thursday.

 

Then another wonder on Friday afternoon. 2 funnel clouds or water spouts (that's what everyone here at the marina called them) appeared and we watched them for a few minutes as they were kicking up dust and stuff where they were hitting.  Pretty cool looking but another thing we watched and hoped they wouldn't make it over to our boat. Everyone we talked to after said that these are very rare and many hadn't seen any for years.  Crazy to have two right together.

 

 

Saturday we went out for some sailing and we listened to conference (yes, Paul could pick up KSL radio from his phone-even out on the ocean- and just plugged it into the speakers for us all to hear). It was a unique way to enjoy the first day of General Conference. It was really nice. We did a little fishing as you can see as well.  Lucy had just put down her line and immediately caught this.  We have no idea what is was.  It was long like an eel but it was a fish and it had scary teeth.  It was metallic silver and crazy looking.  We called it the sea monster.  Emily caught one like it a few minute later.  Then I caught a shark right after that.  Weird fishing day.

 

When Paul went out to start hooking up the spinaker sail he had the sudden urge to do the Titanic scene/pose and yelled out "I'm king of the world" so I had to grab a picture of that. :)

 

 

So, I think I need to take a minute to write about my cool kids. Paul and I have had a stressful couple of weeks with some boat issues and then the lightning experience last week.  But the kids just continue to amaze us.  Don't get me wrong, they sometimes bug and tease and argue as usual, but I love seeing the awesome things they do for each other and just watching them spending so much time together is cool. And their creativity when there has not been a lot of action and adventure lately is pretty cool too. I walked down to Jack's room a couple of days ago and saw him teaching Noah how to play chess. cool.  Later that day, Emily and Noah made up a new game at the lounge involving a crushed paper cup(the ball), a trash can(the basket) and various other items and many rules.  They had a blast and entertained themselves for a long time.  It is called "Flop ball" and Em would have to explain the game to you. cool. 

 

I was a little worried about how it would go to watch General Conference on the boat.  I didn't have my usual activity and coloring pages and stuff like at home.  But again the kids pleasantly surprised me.  There was a big bag of almonds sitting on the table and Emily picked up a paring knife and starting carving an almond. She made this cute little whale.  So all of a sudden Em, Lucy, and Noah are sitting very quietly carving almonds while we watched/listened to conference.  cool. It was possibly our most favorite conference weekend we have had.

 

 

Yesterday at dinner time, they decided to have a dinner party on the dock. cool.  I have just been thinking about how when we approached them with this whole boating idea, they were all on board with it, and even when they were only able to bring 1 box of their stuff from home with them, they did not complain.  I think it is cool that they are learning that they don't need a lot of stuff to be entertained or happy. I think that they are pretty cool.

 

SCARY LIGHTNING

Once again I haven't posted for a while. Not a lot of picture taking moments or excitement lately.  That is until today.  We had a scary experience today and since this is like a journal for us I think I should write it down. We are all fine.  Anyway, Lucy, Paul and I went out to the beach this afternoon just to walk around and look for shark teeth (that is one of our fun new hobbies). Anyway, we hadn't been out there too long, and there was suddenly a blinding white flash of lightning right by us.  It came out of nowhere.  It was not raining and we hadn't had any lightning or thunder -or we wouldn't have been out there- and there were a few darker clouds but they weren't that close by.  So we were very startled and looked where it flashed and saw a man lying on the ground about 30 feet away from us. We started running over to him because he was lying very still, and Paul called out to someone to call 911-we didn't have our phones on us- and when we got to him, he was not doing well. He immediately started turning blue and wasn't breathing, so I started doing CPR.  We asked Lucy to go wait a little ways away in the safest place we could find for her.  She remained calm, watched for the emergency vehicles and did a great job.  A couple more people showed up and Paul ran to get Lucy and show the paramedics where we were (since the beach was down an embankment), and he helped reassure the guy's teenage son who was freaking out. We did CPR for a few minutes and then the man started gasping and I checked and his heart had started beating and he started looking better, although he was still in very bad condition.  It was super scary.  He still couldn't talk and his shirt was burned all over, but he was semi-conscious, so we just tried to keep him calm and still until paramedics finally got there after about 10-12 minutes. It was a really scary experience that I hope I don't have to experience again, but I was glad I was there to help and was relieved to watch him improving.  Man, this lightning has already been one of the most nerve-racking things for us to deal with these past few months.  Apparently Florida has the most lightning strikes of any state (wish we would have known that), and we don't love the lightning here.  Another boat in our marina was hit by lightning last month and it does major damage to a boat.  Is it time to leave Florida yet???

So I will try to get my mind off of that and put up a few photos from the past week.

So, as I mentioned, this is our new hobby we love.  Finding sharks teeth on the beach.  We are finally getting good at it too.  We played at the beach a lot last week.  The boogie boarding was lots of fun!

Yes, that is my head. Catching a good wave.

 

 

Also last week, Paul and Jack helped a friend of ours we met here at the marina to sail his catamaran up to Brunswick, Georgia. His wife had gone home to Vancouver and he didn't want to sail alone. They were gone a couple of days and it all went fine. This is Paul and Jack with our friend John Michele (he is French) and was taken at Fernandina Beach where they stayed the first night.