St Augustine - at a dock

 

We're in Florida! Time for flowers!

I watched the Ohio State University football game with Penn State. It was a good game and OSU won but not by as much as they should. They are currently fifth in the standings and they need to be fourth at least to get into the playoffs. We were at the Jacksonville free docks which do not have electricity so I used the inverter for AC to power the TV. I forgot to turn off the water heater and it turned on to heat the water, draining the batteries flat!

Bird of Paradise. These are from the planting around the St Augustine Art Association
If you're even in St Augustine, this is a must-visit, great local art!

I thought it wasn't so bad since I could run the engine to charge the batteries underway - however, the charger will not turn on if the batteries are less than 12 volts and mine were 11.7 volts. That was not good. We pulled into St Augustine Marina and plugged into shore power and luckily, the inboard inverter which has a built-in charger did turn on. It put 70 amps of current into the batteries for the last 6 hours and only now started to ramp down, now at 50 amps. Hopefully, I didn't ruin my three 4D deep cycle batteries.

The marina here has fully recovered from the rebuilding of the last hurricane, everything works now and the docks are in great shape. It's Halloween night her and the place is rocking - but only in town, the docks are quiet. We will be here one more day to see the sights and then move on to the Bethune Park anchorage on Tuesday. Titusville is next after that, Fleetwing's home for the next three months.