Video Transcript

00:00:00
Good morning from the Great Loop. Today is cruising day number five for us. We’ll be going through St. Augustine. We woke up to something quite alarming this morning. Thankfully, we’re in 10 feet of water because this is all shoaly right here. Sorry that the lighting is not the best. It’s very early in the morning.  You can see there’s an opening over here and an opening behind us because we’re at the “T” of the Matanzas’s inlet. Look at this. You see the fort down there? We were anchored in front of that on the other side of that sign.

00:00:39
See the two poles? Just in front of that sign, not too far, is where we were anchored. Yeah, a little  sketchy. So, we dragged, according to AquaMap, a half mile. We clearly didn’t have enough chain out. And what’s interesting is we’ve been here for a few days. This just happened on  the last night. And we were just talking last night about how we didn’t take the tidal change into effect when we set the anchor at low tide. And we  were glad that the anchor still held and we didn’t have any issues.

00:01:14
I went to bed last night and we were down there, woke up this morning here. No anchor alarm. Quite  crazy. It’s also interesting that the anchor alarm did not go off. I’ve had issues with th AquaMap anchor alarm. I did the screen mirroring and it just continuously does not work between my phone and the tablet. Even though the tablet’s on the boat with Starlink and has internet, it just keeps erroring out. Even when I’m really close, it just errors out.

00:01:39
I couldn’t really monitor the anchor alarm while we were hiking ashore. We’re asleep. It’s plugged in. Got the anchor alarm going. But nothing. In fact, I checked it this morning and it said that we were only 124 feet away from the anchor. I was like, that can’t be right. I backed out of AquaMap, opened it back up, and  it took a little while to load. Yeah. 0.5 nautical miles we dragged. Insane. Time to do our morning  checks.

00:02:05
Luckily, everything’s good. I checked the depth already. We’re in like 8 feet of water but there’s shoaling 200 feet from us that we could have dragged into. Luckily everything seems to be okay and we have a rising tide in our favor. So if we were to be aground a little bit, we’ve got the tide coming up in the next few hours. But time to get the engine checks done so we can get underway and hit St. Augustine today. Now we have a 3 and 1/2  ft draft, so we’re okay. But yeah, kind of crazy. You can see it better in the daylight. There’s the fort we were by. Now we’re in the channel.

00:02:41
I’m going to go ahead and use the maps here,  AquaMap and Argo to go back over towards this side because I know it’s deep over there where the channel is. There’s a Bob’s track side track to go to this fort. Okay, navigating my way back over to Bob’s tracks. Now, we were sitting like 10-11 feet of water, but it is dead high tide right now. It’s 7 a.m. and this is high tide, so it’s pretty much slack. I’m so glad that the anchor dragged going this direction instead of the other way like towards the inlet because  the National Park Service dock was within a half a mile.

00:03:06
So if we would have dragged the same distance the other way could have dragged into their dock last night. So pretty wild. I mean we experienced multiple tidal changes. So the boat swung numerous times but for whatever reason this time it came undone and we pulled the anchor up. It came up so easily. normally it grabs a few times and the winch kind of bogs down. You can hear it struggling. No struggling to pull the anchor out this morning and it was super clean.

00:03:38
It definitely come dislodged at one of our 180’s, which if I remember right, 700 p.m. was high tide, 1:00 a.m. was low tide, and then 700 a.m. was high tide. That’s how it’s been approximately the last couple days that we’ve been here. So, crazy. I’m so glad that that  worked out and everything is okay. That was a little nerve-wrecking when I woke up. I won’t  lie. The first thing I did was come up here, look around the spotlight because it was 5:30 in the morning and turned on my depth finder to see if we were sitting on the  bottom or not. Thankfully, we weren’t.
00:06:07
Right here? This is fabulous! Made to St. Augustine. We’re anchored right by the Castillo de San Marcos. We’re right by the Bridge of Lions. Remember, this is a GoPro lens, so very wide angle. We’re pretty close. Pretty awesome. We’re going to go over to the city marina on the other side of the bridge.

00:07:01
Pay the dinghy dock fee, which is, I think, 15 bucks. And then we can use their laundry. And then from there, head into town to go out to eat. We haven’t been out to eat since we started the Great Loop. Also going to see if we can check out anything cool in St. Augustine. I’ve already done the pirate museum, but if you’re coming through and haven’t done it, it’s pretty cool, especially if you have younger kids.

00:07:21
The St. Augustine Pirate Museum has the only authentic pirate chest ever recovered, which just so happens to be Thomas Tew’s, whom I’m named after. I’m a descendant from his brother, who was the lieutenant governor of the colonies of Rhode Island. My mother was a Tew, and I was always told that I was named after him. But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I looked into my ancestry myself, and was able to confirm it. He’s my great great great great great uncle and the reason we fly his flag on Swamp Puppy. 

00:07:45
I’ve loved the water from a young age and like Thomas Tew, I’m known for my charisma and being a fair leader. When he told his crew he wanted to turn to piracy, they responded with, “A gold chain or a wooden leg, we will stand with you.” Tew had one of the most successful pirate cruises in history, amassing a large amount of wealth, which I unfortunately didn’t inherit. We’re going to go in check out the fort because I don’t think Elyse has done that before. This is my third time to St. Augustine. First time by boat. I came via RV the first time and of course checked out the pirate museum.

00:08:12
And then Elyse and I came through in Ogre our campervan, I think  last year, and did the pirate museum again. So we’re not going to do the pirate museum this time. Time to drop this dinghy. The Mantus dinghy is doing great. Really loving the dinghy. It’s so stable. I wish we had a little bit more horsepower with two people. With one person it’s fine.  Gets up on plane and scoots everywhere. But I think if we had a 20 horse (because we have a 15) with two of us, we might be able to get up on plane because otherwise we kind of we could only go 9-10 miles an hour. But that’s how it goes.

00:08:48
We’ve been here for 2 and 1/2 hours and  the anchor has held great. But we just don’t trust it because of what happened this morning, waking up a half mile away. Before we go to shore, I have this screen mirroring so it should send it to my phone, and it is currently working, but the other day it was very buggy and wasn’t really working. And then I also did this. Our security camera, I have one of  them pointing directly at it. Essentially I can see the screen via the camera. If it stops mirroring, at least I can check on the security camera because the screen won’t time out.

00:09:20
It’s plugged in and everything. I think we’re going to be just fine. This is how we’re gonna check on it.

00:10:18
Of course, we stopped for Mexican food for lunch, which was absolutely fantastic. Would highly recommend stopping by Casa Reina. Then we walked over to the National Monument, which is really close. And you can see we anchored really close to National Monument, just north of it on the west side of the bay. There’s also an anchorage on the other side of the channel on the east side of the little bay there, north of the Bridge of Lions.

00:11:19
If you’re into history at all, in my opinion, St. Augustine is a must stop because after all, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the United States. It was settled by Spain in 1565, which is pretty wild. And Florida and the fort itself there at St. Augustine, which of course the fort has changed  names a few times, but was actually controlled by four different governments and exchanged hands five times, all peaceful.

00:11:54
Spain originally had it, then the Kingdom of Great Britain, then Spain again during a second time period for, let’s see, another 40 years or so, and then the United States had it. So, pretty cool. A lot of history there. In fact, the fort itself was used up until 1933. The fort has a ton of history along with St. Augustine. Definitely a must stop. Well, the anchor alarm is going off, I checked the security camera and it says we moved 25 ft. So, got to go just check on the boat.

00:12:34
We set off from the city marina and went  back underneath the Bridge of Lions, which is such a cool bridge. Take the time to look at it and check it out when you’re going through this area. It’s just a neat and unique bridge. But on the way over to Swamp Puppy, we knew that if we drifted too far back, we might get into like a little sandbar that was on the left side or to the rear of Swamp Puppy. And so it  moving 25 ft kind of worried us, especially after it had drug a half mile that morning. So we were a little overly cautious about everything and went back to the boat.

00:13:04
In hindsight, I think  it would have been just fine. And I think I just didn’t have the proximity set correctly on the anchor alarm and then it wasn’t actually dragging. Regardless, at the time we were worried about it, so we moved the boat over to the north side of the bay. Set the hook again, made sure  everything felt good, and then headed back over to the marina and went and got some groceries. On our way back from getting the groceries, we saw a sailboat come through. Okay, it was a motorboat that looked like a sailboat and it had a ton of people on board.

00:13:31
I think it was a sunset cruise thing going on. And this fun pirate ship thing pulled up in front of the fort  and you know kind of attacked it which was a neat thing to see. We had a successful grocery haul. Look at this. So much stuff. Time to get it from the little boat onto the big boat. After about 10 days on board, we definitely needed groceries. You can see the fridge was looking mighty bare, but we got plenty of groceries. Everything was good. And then we just enjoyed the evening.

00:14:05
We watched the little pirate ship go back through the Bridge of  Lions, listened to a hawk a few times throughout the night and try to just settle in once a lot of the wakes cuts down and everyone went to bed. Thank you so much for watching this video. Hopefully you enjoyed it. If you did, give us a thumbs up. Make sure you’re subscribed and that you have the bell rung for notifications. That way you’ll get notified when a new video comes out because unfortunately YouTube doesn’t always show all of our subscribers a video. Until we see you in the next one, take care.