We spent a nice day coming up the ICW, through Palm Valley, and onto the St. Johns River, heading west towards Jacksonville. It was this day that I learned about serious current. Active Captain had warned about some currents under bridges in the ICW, but when we hit the river, we slowed to a crawl. Between and adverse wind of about 15 gusting to 22, and an adverse current of about 2.5 knots, all of the current-assisted great time we made between 7 am and 1 pm was forgotten. For the better part of two hours, our SOG was less than 2 knots, and for a few minutes it was exactly 1.0 knot. We debated anchoring and waiting for the shift, but decided than any progress was progress, and finally made it to our selected anchorage.
Well, Active Captain had it wrong. Despite threading our way in carefully, and following the info in the "reviews" and the contours on the chartplotter, we ran into 4 feet of water where there should have been 8+ (we draw 4.0 feet). So we waited for the tide to come up, and in about 20 minutes we were afloat. I made a 180 and we went back out to the channel and proceeded to our backup location.
What a wonderful anchorage. Even though it is very close to a bridge, there was very little traffic noise, and many dolphins.
There was also (briefly) this unusual rainbow segment, isolated to the water vapor around one section of cloud (the picture doesn't do it justice). Maybe the pilot towing the banner put in a special order:
This is the bridge we are near, at sunset last night:
I guess tonight is a full moon, and it was up early, in the east. The house on the far left is not on fire, it has a lot of windows, and you are seeing the sunset:
Jacksonville has a lot of bridges, and we went under most of them today, exploring as far as the Naval Air Station on the St. Johns River. Unfortunately, the winds were light and variable, so we motored. We wanted to get together with some friend on the Ortega River, who continue their third time on the Great Loop starting next Tuesday, but the water was a little thin (I'm a little gunshy after yesterday) so that didn't come to pass. Instead, it will be breakfast tomorrow with them. Coming back downriver through downtown, there was no room on any of the free docks due to a huge heavy metal festival. So we came back to the same anchorage as last night. Here is the next bridge upriver, to our southwest:
Tomorrow we will go back upriver, where the river widens quite a bit, and spend the day sailing.