Sails On! Sails Off!

Oh my. What a season. Or, non-season, to be more accurate. Yeesh.

We happily launched Wild Horses a few weeks ago and quickly moved her to a dock at Reynolds Yacht Centre, a mere 1.3 nautical miles north. Yes, you read that correctly. After four months living on the boat on land, waiting for our engine to be rebuilt, and dreaming about heading south…our first trip on the water was to head north.
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But this wasn’t a move borne in craziness. No, Green Cove Springs is on the St. John’s River and the only way to get to “getting south” is to first go north to Jacksonville, where the St. John’s River meets the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) and also provides an inlet that opens itself directly to the Atlantic Ocean. Sailors take either of these two routes as they head south.

At Reynolds, our plan was to spend about a week provisioning and emptying our storage locker before making our own journey south, with a new plan to go to the Florida Keys rather than the Bahamas. We had about two months left in our season, which sounds like a lot until you start factoring in distances and weather. The Bahamas is hundreds of nautical miles from Green Cove Springs. And the weather was forecasted to be terrible for crossing to the Bahamas over the next week. We knew it would improve but our fear was being in the Bahamas and trying to rush back to the States to haul out before we needed to be back across the border. We do our best not to move Wild Horses on a schedule and all we could see was a big old schedule if we tried to get to the Bahamas. We would be rushing provisioning, rushing the crossing of the Gulf Stream, rushing to get to a Bahamian sandy beach. Maybe we would have one moment to breathe deep and dip a toe in the beautiful blue Bahamian water and then…we would be rushing back to stage our crossing of the Gulf Stream again, and then rushing to haulout and to prep the boat for another summer in Florida. Yikes, it only sounded stressful to us. No, we wanted some calm joy on the water. So, instead, we set our sights on the Florida Keys, or as far south in Florida as we could get.

We started to get the boat cruising ready. We attached our sails, installed our full enclosure, set up our boat cushions, and made a loose plan of our journey.

Docked at Reynolds Marina

Sails are on!

Ocean moving about the boat. It is definitely her happy place.

Beautiful mornings at Reynolds Marina.

​Sigh. Two weeks later and we are still at Reynolds Yacht Centre.

What happened?

First, another boat issue reared its ugly head. On our short cruise from Green Cove Springs Marina to Reynolds, we saw that the navigational instruments tied to our autopilot weren’t working. That means no depth, wind or speed readings and no autopilot. All of this is not critical…except depth. Without a depth reading, running aground becomes a real possibility, especially in the ICW.

We did some troubleshooting of the issue ourselves and with some of our sailor friends, but we couldn’t find the source of the failure.

At our wits end, we called Al’s Mobile Marine Service (our fabulous mechanic!) and he had one of his electronics technicians come to our boat to diagnose and fix the problem. This added a one-week delay to our plans.
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Hiking in Green Cove Springs

Lots of kids on a school excursion in St. Augustine want to meet Ocean. We are used to this now!

Hosting on Wild Horses. 17 adults & kids plus 2 dogs.

Two of our favourite kids from a neighbouring boat enjoy an evening watching kids movies on Wild Horses

Big days of entertaining makes Ocean very tired!

During all of this, we were chatting with family and friends. We are very lucky to have lots of support and cheering from the sidelines, biggest among those are our moms and dads. They share our joy and our pain, and make both even better, no matter where or what we are doing. It was after one of our calls back home that we realized that a quick trip to the Florida Keys is not where our hearts and our heads are fixed.

We are ready to be home, back in Canada, where we can give real hugs to our moms and dads and to give back some of that support that they so freely give to us while we are living out our dreams on the water.

Lucky us 😊.

Our sails are now off again and Wild Horses is getting ready for its second summer in Florida. We will move the boat back to Green Cove Springs Marina in about a week and then head back to Canada. The boating season wasn’t much for us this year but it hasn’t spoiled our sense of adventure. We will return to Florida next fall with plans of sailing south once again. Where? Not sure but the dreaming is in full swing and we are ready for whatever is next for our cruising life 😊.

Sigh. Sails are now off the boat, flaked and stored until next Fall

Ocean getting cleaned up for our travels back to Canada

Ocean looking off the dock, ready for more adventures