Video Transcript

(0:00) Welcome back to our Great Loop adventure!

(0:02) It’s another beautiful morning here on anchor and I’ve got some breakfast going for us already and last night I soaked some beans so I can make 12 bean soup in the slow cooker for us to enjoy later this evening. 

(1:15) Welcome to Great Loop, cruising day number seven here aboard Swamp Puppy.

(1:37) We left Pine Island, it was so beautiful and peaceful and was really nice to escape St. Augustine because we were getting waked like crazy there and today we’re heading to a free dock on the north side of Jacksonville. 

(1:47) There’s tons of free docks in Jacksonville so we’re gonna head to one of those and we should be there about 10:30 AM.

(1:54) Relatively short day overall. This is our last full day of cruising in Florida. Tomorrow we’ll only be in Florida for a few hours and then on to Georgia.

(3:10) So far the cruise has been absolutely beautiful. We’ve gone through a bunch of nature. There’s nothing but pine trees and just quiet beautiful Florida. Lots of houses on this side once we got a little bit further, but not too bad.

(3:26) The boat traffic is not too bad for a Friday. It’s a really nice cruise overall, the weather is just perfect.

(3:38) I’m definitely pretty tired today, I think we’re on day 11 of full-time cruising and we’ve been on the boat living on it for a little over two weeks today. 

(3:45) It’s two weeks in a day. So we haven’t had a car and we’ve been living on the boat for two weeks and 11 days of solid cruising. 

(3:53) And I think I’m tired because the last couple days were a little stressful and just busy. 

(3:59) I’m looking forward to today. We’re gonna be at the dock at 10:30 AM. 

(4:03) So first free dock and I’m looking forward to an earlier day. 

(4:07) So we still get some cruising in, we’re going about 30-ish miles today and still be done around 10:30 AM. Then gotta get tied up. 

(4:15) Hopefully I can catch up on a little bit of rest and get some of the videos edited.

(6:10) I’m checking out what miles per hour we are per RPM. We’re in a quiet area right now. It’s slack tide. 

(6:17) And so I’m going through every hundred RPMs and logging it on my sheet because the Yanmar manual, which you know is translated from Japanese and it’s in grams of diesel per horse power. 

(6:30) It’s not easy to calculate gallons per hour for a miles per gallon ratio. 

(6:37) So I’m updating my Google Sheet as we go. We’re currently going 1000 RPMs and we’re going 6.8 miles per hour. So I hypothesize that we go 6.9 based on our other speeds. So I was pretty close but I’m gonna change this to 6.8. 

(6:56) Which puts us at 2.49 gallons per hour or 2.73 miles per gallon. 

(7:03) So very fuel-efficient, but obviously very slow at this speed. 

(7:29) Onward and upward! 

(8:19) 30 minutes left and I’ll be at the dock. You gonna take a nap as soon as you get docked?

(9:03) So two bridges ago, I was reading a warning about it because apparently during the spring tides it has like 5.7 knots of current two foot waves coming through it. 

(9:13) Someone basically went and tried to go through it. It was pushing them around. They had a full keel single engine. So they just went to neutral and let it push them back out, but they couldn’t make it through it was too high a tide. 

(9:25) So they had to wait for it to be a little more slack to make it through because they didn’t have the power. 

(9:43) Oh, there’s a sunken boat! 

(11:19) We spent two nights tied to the free dock at Jim King Park at Sisters Creek in Jacksonville, Florida 

(11:33) And after that, we’re moving on to Cumberland Island National Seashore 

(11:37) If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe for the next one. Thanks, and we’ll see you then!