Thursday, July 1, 1993

Great. Now Roy's caught my cold. Just what we need--both of us sick at the same time. If he feels as knocked out as I do, we won't be able to go anywhere.
Motorsailed twenty miles north to Fernandina Beach. Doesn't sound very far, but with all the ins and outs, it took several hours.
We can't understand why the marinas on the East Coast charge so much more than the marinas on the West Coast. Nearly every marina in Florida charges close to $1 a foot. In California, we thought 50 cents a foot was outrageously high. Most marinas charged 30 to 40 cents a foot. And the marinas in Florida certainly aren't any better than the ones in California; most are worse.
I freaked out when Roy told me he paid $36 to tie up at the wrecked Sisters Creek Marina. That's outrageous!
We anchored out in Fernandina Harbor and paid $5 for the privilege of tying our Royaks to the marina dinghy dock.
This is a quaint old town, reminiscent of the antebellum South. Most of the houses have verandas with wicker rocking chairs.
I phoned my doctor in California and told him about my cough. He gave me the name of a medicine to take, but he said I probably couldn't buy it without a prescription, which turned out to be the case. He advised me to see a Kaiser doctor in Georgia. I'd been planning on doing that anyway. There are Kaisers in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, but none in Florida.
We went to a drugstore and bought some more cough syrup and cough drops. Roy stopped at an ATM and popped out some money. I crossed the street to the Post Office and cashed a $70 money order that I had sent to the FCC several months ago, but they had refused to accept it and mailed it back, which is fine by me, since we no longer need that license anyway.
We were walking along the sidewalk, looking for a grocery store, when a young couple in a car pulled up and offered us a ride. They had done a lot of sailing and said we looked like cruisers looking for a grocery store! They drove us right to the nearest Winn-Dixie super market and told us they thought the store would drive us back to the marina. They were right; we talked with the assistant manager, and he said he'd arrange a ride for us. Wow, what service! We had planned on buying only two things, about $4 worth, but now that we had a ride, we stocked up and bought $35 worth of groceries. We were very glad we didn't have to walk to the marina; it was quite a ways.
Paddled back to the boat, and then Roy took the gas can to the fuel dock and bought a couple of gallons of gas for the generator.
We're right at the state line. Tomorrow we'll be in Georgia!
Heard on the radio that the Jacksonville area had severe thunderstorms this afternoon, with wind gusting to 81 MPH! We just got out of there in the nick of time. A sailboat came limping in to Fernandina with its headsail in shreds.