The Great Wander

Sitting in the cockpit, as the sun was rising, enjoying my first cup of coffee, I heard a sharp exhale of air, like someone or something breathing.  As I glanced across the anchorage at Pine Island, I noticed several dolphins swimming around the boat.  This was going to be our first longer term anchorage along our way south, and having such visitors as the dolphins first thing in the morning helped us to really enjoy this little spot off of the ICW.

The island isn’t much of an island.  It’s a grassy marsh with a channel running around it.  Through the grassy marsh, you find other channels that you can kayak or paddleboard through.  About a mile from where we were anchored, it looked like you could go ashore there and walk through some pine trees and eventually hit highway A1A.  We never attempted that, but when the tide swung the boat around to face the trees in the morning, watching the sunrise breaking through the pines was a spectacular start to the day.

ActiveCaptain is a Garmin program that boaters use for charts and navigation.  One of the other really nice things about it is that there’s a community aspect where people mark anchorages and leave reviews about those anchorages.  

People had left several reviews about the water levels, tides, etc.  It all seemed like we were in a pretty good place to drop anchor.  One of the best things is that we were close enough to the ICW that when we were ready to start moving again, we could get moving.  But we were far enough away that only one other boat came near us during the week.

We chose to hang out in Pine Island for several days.  We’d been underway for a few days and hadn’t really wanted to pay to stay in Saint Augustine.  While we were far enough away that we couldn’t go to any of the sights of St. Augustine, we were enjoying the solitude of being away from most people.

Pine Island was our first introduction to places on the ICW that you can only see from the ICW.  If you don’t have a boat, you can’t go visit this area.  There’s no hiking trails into there.  There’s no driving.  The only way to see it is by boat.  

Spectacular, amazing, beautiful, awe inspiring are all adjectives that I find myself using a lot as I write these posts.  Enough so that I think they lose some impact because I use them so much, and then try to find a new way to say it.  Places like this really do warrant all of those words.

We have an inflatable kayak and stand up paddle board.  While we were at Pine Island we pulled out the kayak and explored the tall grass channels around the boat.  As we paddled through the grass, we kept expecting to see alligators or snakes, but we didn’t see any.  We did spook some egrets and other birds.  Of course there were also the dolphins that would visit most every morning.

Pine Island was the beginning of the deposits into the boatlife account.  We’d had a lot of withdrawals with the electrical repair work.  We needed some deposits and sitting here just north of Saint Augustine in a little bit of backcountry really began to put some positives in the account.  We were really starting to enjoy this lifestyle and see why people do this.

When we made the decision to pull up anchor and head south, we both had a mix of emotions.  On the one hand, we were sad to be leaving this little piece of backcountry that we could see by boat.  On the other hand the whole reason to do this was to explore new places, and the only way to do that was to pull up the anchor and start moving.