The weather offshore doesn’t look great, so we’re sticking to the ICW for a while. Monday morning we were up and at ‘em, driving the ditch. The weather is beautiful and we’ve got two working engines, so life is grand!

We anchored in St. Augustine. We’ve been watching the forecast, there are some very strong winds forecast for Wednesday and Thursday, and there aren’t many protected anchorages around here. It looks like our current location would be protected from the north, so maybe we’d be more comfortable just riding it out here. We can either stay in our current anchorage, or there’s a field of mooring balls just south of us. Mooring balls should be extremely secure, and we haven’t tested our anchor in strong wind yet, so there’s a peace of mind factor.

Tuesday morning we moved over to the mooring field. It was our first time picking up a mooring, and I was a little nervous about the strong current, plus the wind was picking up. However, there’s a lot of forgiveness with a catamaran, as long as you get close to the ball it’s pretty easy to grab. I had to crab sideways through the mooring field due to the current, but I had no problem driving right to the mooring ball and Kyle picked it up.

I don’t want to brag, but it turns out I’m great at boats.

This mooring field has an added perk – a shuttle boat that will pick people up and bring them to the marina. We ate a quick lunch, then took the shuttle into town. Kyle wanted to go back to the Sailor’s Exchange for an electrical part he wanted, which was a bit of a walk but we needed to stretch our legs anyway.

After that, we headed over to Dog Rose Brewing. We’d walked past it a million times because it was situated right between our AirBNB and downtown St. Augustine, but we never had a chance to stop by. Time to fix that!

We had a little time to kill before the next shuttle, so we wandered down by the waterfront for some photos.

We chatted with people at the marina and on the shuttle boat, and it’s pretty clear that we’ve chosen wrong – the strong wind that’s coming is a nor’easter, and the swell is going to be…intense. However, it’s really too late for us to move, as the wind is starting to pick up and we’d have to get to the other side of the bridge to get to either the marina or the other mooring field.

Sometime after we went to bed, the swell picked up enough that the bridgedeck slamming and general pounding from the waves kept us from sleep.

On Wednesday, the wind was very intense, sustained winds around 30 and gusts up to 40 knots. The swell was also intense, relentless pounding and bouncing and slamming. Neither of us got anything done. I pretty much spent the day on my laptop and watching movies. Kyle tried to get some work done but he started feeling seasick. It was like that all day and all night. Relentless. Bouncing. Slamming.

We didn’t sleep much Wednesday night either.

It was supposed to calm down Thursday. We were supposed to be able to move on. Instead, the forecast changed, winds were around 18-20 knots all day, gusting up to 30. We ended up reserving the mooring ball for another night. By now the lack of sleep was really getting to me, also we’ve been waking up to a wet, slimy boat for the past few days. The boat is covered in salt, and the high humidity makes the salt slimy. We can’t clean it up until we either get some rain. It’s not a big deal by itself, but with everything else going on it’s just another stone on the misery pile.

By afternoon the waves were still bouncing, but calm enough that we called the shuttle to take us in. We showered and walked around town but didn’t stop anywhere.

We’ve been dissecting our situation a lot lately. Essentially, do we want to keep the boat? So far it’s been nothing but headaches. Money and misery. I keep picturing fun things, like taking the grill and slackline to the beach and spending the afternoon in the sun, or paddleboarding around remote islands. Swimming off the back of the boat. We’re still a long way from that happening.