Saturday, April 5, 2014

Harbortown in Jacksonville - at a dock

Floating, concrete docks at Harbortown, no current, free electric, great place
Nice, easy day to go north. We chose slack tide to leave our slip at St. Augustine so that was no problem. Of the three boats that we left with, we were the only one that went north up the ICW, the rest went outside. It was a pleasant ride north, no waves, no wind and we made our marina by 12:30. The marina, Harbortown, used to take in transients but then they had a bad experience with one crew that claimed they tripped over something on the dock and sued the marina for medical expensives. The dockhand we talked to didn't believe for an instant that they actually paid the doctor what they claimed, they just wanted to collect easy money, $5000 worth. It would have cost the marina more than that just to contest the lawsuit. So the end result was to punish all law abiding cruisers by not allowing dockage to cruisers in the future. So once again, one bad apple ruins the barrel for everyone else! However, since the dockmaster knows us personally, we can still get a dock but nobody else can. 

Economy's recovering in Florida - it appears. This was a vacant lot in the fall
I walked into town for butter and hamburger buns and discovered that Fresh Market was open again, it had been closed when we came south in the fall. It is a great supermarket, somewhat like Adams in Arlington. I stocked up on huge grapefruit, lobster salad, fresh tuna steaks, pastries for Sunday morning Macedonia nut cookies for Ann, her favorite.


We'll just spend one night here and ride the incoming tide to Jacksonville and Sadler Point Marina where we'll have our genset serviced. There's nothing wrong with it but it needs a yearly checkup. Hopefully, we'll meet up again with Lee and Emma Rose. 

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