February 1/5 - Guano, Tolomato, Mantanzes Estuary & Research Center

We departed Jacksonville Beach at 8:00 am heading south with the current.  The water was smooth but the sky held intermittent clouds.  We entered the Guano, Tolomato, Mantanzes Estuary or GTME and cruised until the wind picked up forcing us to drop anchor at 4:00 pm.

This was a beautiful stretch of the ICW and I clicked the camera all day long!

February 2nd - We departed at 10:00 am and cruised for approximately 30 minutes but the sun was so intermittent the Captain decided to stop and charge the batteries.  With the lead topped off, we restarted again at noon continuing with a strong current in our favor, strong headwind against us, and the solar panels collecting 3000 watts despite the cloudy, rainy conditions.  At about 6:00 pm we stopped at the GTM Research Center.  We signed up to attend their annual symposium in about a week so we wanted to scope out the anchorage options.

It was a pretty cruise up the windy trail to the Research Center.

February 3rd - We started out early the next morning heading for Vilano Beach where there is a Publix accessible by boat.  Vilano Beach has a very nice public dock that we were able to tie the Arc to and went shopping after which we continued on down the ICW to anchor just south of St. Augustine at sunset.  The next day we hooked up to a City of St. Augustine mooring ball in order to do laundry, empty the holding tank and fill the water tanks.  We then headed north to the GTM Estuary Research Center in anticipation of the annual symposium on Friday.

The symposium was informational and we met some interesting folks.  During this time the Alltrax DCX 500 controller mysteriously stopped working.  After trouble shooting and several discussions with the dealer, the controller was in the mail for repair and return.  We would like to thank EV Drives for their excellent customer service.  They had our system back on line in record time!  In the meanwhile we were forced to rely on "Big Ben" our 51 year old diesel who, so far, has never failed to start up and push the Arc with gusto. Carter often remarks that he is more impressed with that old diesel than the new solar electric drive he put together but the two systems compliment each other well. Although it's nice to have the extra power and get the extra mile an hour with Big Ben, we really don't like running the old machine too much so it is reserved for emergencies. Having a press conference a hundred miles away in 4 days and a broken electric motor controller qualified so we bought 30 gallons of fuel and busted it down to Daytona.

February 9th - We weighed anchor heading south to Daytona Beach for the next ReThink Energy press conference to be held at Captain Daddys on February 14th.