We spent two nights in the Camachee Cove Marina, about 1.5 miles north of St. Augustine, but once we'd replaced our toasted regulator with the new one (see previous log), and used all the marina services (water, laundry, etc.) we needed, it was time to move to a cheaper and more convenient spot to explore the city.
The currents really rip along the Matanzas River. When we'd arrived at the marina, I had to angle sharply into the narrow entrance channel in order to get between the jetties without being swept past. Of course, when our bow poked into that protected area, we immediately started to speed up and spin sideways, so it took some quick steering to get back into a straight line. On the way out, it was the same thing in reverse: as soon as we nosed out past the jetties, the bow started swinging around in the current. The tide was going out, and the St. Augustine entrance was between us and the city seawall where we were planning to anchor, so for the first half of the short trip we were roaring at 9 knots -- then as soon as we passed the inlet, boom, down to 4.5. We anchored just past the Castillo de San Marcos, the Spanish-era fort which is now a National Monument.
We'd been expecting St. Augustine to be similar to Santa Fe. Both were staked out as Spanish claims, and both are among the oldest settlements in the United States (St. Augustine claims to be the oldest, as it was founded in 1565; Santa Fe was settled 45 years later). But where Santa Fe is spare and elegant (think Georgia O'Keefe), St. Augustine is lushly opulent. The palm trees, hibiscus, and live oak dripping with Spanish moss are very un-desert-like. Also, St. Augustine's original structures were destroyed centuries ago, by hurricanes, fires, and wars between the British and Spanish settlers. While there are still a few homes and modest buildings remaining from the mid-18th century, the city is dominated by the huge "Spanish Renaissance" structures built by Henry Flagler in the 1880's. His Ponce de Leon Hotel, which is now Flagler College, is incredible: ornately carved columns, wrought iron gates, and Tiffany stained glass windows. Every bit of the domed foyer is painted or gilded or carved. His other hotels (some of which are still hotels, others are museums or public buildings) are similarly grand, as are the several churches he built.
We also visited the Castillo, which was built shortly after the city was settled. It's massive and very European in feel. Its walls (along with many other walls in St. Augustine) are made from coquina, which is a sort of conglomerate stone composed largely of seashells -- sort of a natural concrete. The fort was involved in many battles and sieges, but never taken, although it changed hands frequently as the area passed from Spanish to English and back to Spanish, then became American shortly before Florida joined the rest of the South in secession. During the weekend we were there, volunteers dressed in Civil War costumes camped out on the Castillo's grounds and gave various demonstrations, including a demonstration of shooting a cannon atop the bastion facing out to the river. We were thankful they were just using blanks, because they shot at our boat all weekend!
We'd noticed over the past week that Florida really does it up grand in terms of Christmas decorations. Maybe it's to compensate for never having a "white Christmas". But as we'd motored down a canal with houses on one side, we noticed that every house was decorated, and many people had also decorated their docks and their boats with Santas, reindeer, ribbons, tinsel, and the like. St. Augustine was splendidly decked out with strings of white lights in all the trees, across all the buildings, and even across the Bridge of Lions drawbridge. (Lions are a big theme in St. Augustine, since Florida was claimed for Spain by Ponce de Leon.) At night, the whole city shone.
But the best light display we saw was on Saturday night: the
"Regatta of Lights" parade. Spectators lined the seawall and the
bridge, but we had a front-row seat from our cockpit. 
One
boat after another drove by, each festooned with the most incredible
Christmas lights. Leaping dolphins, Santas, angels, spirals, stars,
all picked out in lights. A loudspeaker played extremely loud
Christmas music and the crowd cheered and hollered, competing with
the noise of thirty boats with generators running, driving around in
slow circles around the anchorage to show off their light displays.
Amazing stuff.
We're really happy we installed our SSB radio before we started south, because we've been using it a lot. We keep in touch with the various cruisers we've met, finding out where they are and where they're going, so we can try to bump into them down the road. We've used it to chat with friends on Dawn Treader, another Caliber 40LRC, who are currently in the British Virgin Islands, and we've used it to tell our friends on Kindly Light, who were 50 miles ahead of us at the time, "wait up for us in St. Augustine!" (and they did). We know that Shamal is 100 miles ahead of us, and that Effie's 100 miles behind.
The radio is a useful safety tool as well as a social one. On the morning before we left Fernandina Beach, we checked in on the Cruiseheimer's Net (8152 MHz at 0830 EST), as we do most days. That morning, someone put out an alert for a boat called Thirsty Whale; it had left Daytona to go north a week before, singlehanding, and was apparently overdue. The person looking for the boat described it and said that the family of the guy on it were concerned.
We spent the morning in Fernandina, as we were waiting for mail to arrive, but weighed anchor just before noon. As we were about to turn into a cut of the Amelia River, not five minutes after we started down the ICW, a boat matching the description we'd heard that morning came out of the cut. We checked the transom as it passed -- sure enough, it was Thirsty Whale. He didn't answer our hail on VHF so we turned around and chased him, Britt standing on the bow blasting our air horn. Finally, over the VHF: "Um, sailboat following me, are you trying to get my attention?"
We passed on the request for him to contact his family, and he promised he'd call home in Fernandina. Then we turned around and continued southward. The next morning, we duly checked in on the net and reported our encounter with Thirsty Whale. The bamboo telegraph has sure been updated, but it still works!
We have also been playing with getting weatherfaxes on our SSB. We've been trying out some shareware called jvcomm3 which uses the PC's sound card to decode the blips and beeps of an HF weatherfax transmission. We don't really need HF (high frequency radio, i.e. SSB/shortwave) weather information yet, since we're never out of VHF weather radio range in the ICW, but when we go offshore, weatherfaxes will be an important and useful tool. The more practice we can get now, the better things will be when we are relying on this kind of transmission.
We've been continually impressed with the quality of our charts, and with the lavish and accurate marking on the ICW. Lots of aids to navigation (daymarks and buoys) wherever they're needed, and a reasonably careful person should have no trouble at all. But we ran into -- literally -- one glaring exception the other day.
In the Nassau Sound, between Fernandina Beach and the St. John's River, the channel marks we saw bore no relation to the marks on our chart. We had a recently updated chart, but apparently it wasn't actually up to date; the channel had been moved to the other side of the river and the markers had been moved to reflect this. Well, we figured, we should just follow the new marks, and we'll be ok. And we were -- until just past the last red buoy.
We rounded the buoy properly, not too closely, but the bottom came up in a hurry, and suddenly we grounded HARD. We were powering at 6.8 knots and went to zero, with less than 5 feet of water in a spot where our chart showed 22 feet! I gave it some throttle in reverse and backed off ok, did a very wide circle in water much more shallow than the chart indicated, and finally found reasonable water well to the left of the channel we were supposed to enter. I ended up aiming to the left of the green until we got quite close. There was a ketch not too far behind us, and we tried to raise them on the VHF to warn them, but they weren't listening. So we watched them with the binocs as they approached the same mark and did the same dance we did: round the red, back up suddenly, wide circle. Later we talked to friends who had done the same stretch a few days earlier -- same drill.
We had this summer's update of the CD chart, but we surmise the summer hurricanes had shifted the bottom around. Gotta get those Notices To Mariners and constantly update, I guess -- even a six-month-old chart's out of date! Then, after they'd shifted the buoys and channel, the bottom kept shifting and ran the shoal out into the new channel. This should be good practice for the Bahamas, where there are far fewer aids to navigation, and the charts are much less detailed. Of course, we'll have to be more cautious there -- hitting a coral head is a lot worse than hitting ICW mud.