Jacksonville at Beach Marine

There were 30 ft boats on the mooring balls too

Leaving St. Mary’s I took photos of the largest mooring balls I’ve ever seen. Normal sized boats were moored at most of them which made the mooring ball taller than the deck of the boats! Maybe they are meant for cruise ships? With temperatures in the 70’s, bright sun, blue sky – we got a call from Monique in Connecticut that Matthew and the kids had a two hour delay today for school due to 2 inches of snow! Nice to be in the south at this time of year but strangely, we do miss the snow but we’ll see plenty of that during our December visit via car.
As usual, I accessed Active Captain and printed out the cautions for the trip. We keep them in the cockpit for use as we go through each problem area. However, we are currently traveling during high tide so we never encountered a problem anyway.

We chose Beach Marine since Don and Liz, who are leaving the boat Wednesday, are familiar with the area and can pick up a rental car for their return trip to Charleston where they first joined us. It was great fun having them aboard and a big help!

Sunset at Beach Marine - Jacksonville, FL

At Beach Marine we were surprised that the fuel dock was “protected” by large piling. I would have thought the metal, floating docks would have been cushioned with rub rails and then presented to visiting boats for easy docking. Instead you see these large pilings between you and the fuel dock which fends off boats. We’re especially concerned since we don’t have rub rails. Every fuel dock until now either had pilings with vertical fenders or floating docks where we could use our own fenders – but not here. The restaurant didn’t look very inviting either so we ate in. Some good color in the sunset though. Wednesday we have to do some planning for the rest of the trip and look for a dock to rent in Stuart for the month of December while we’re up north for Christmas (suggestions appreciated).