So how do boaters celebrate St. Patty's Day? By 'bearing off the green'. Is that groaning I hear? Apparently my proposal to the Coast Guard, to honor the day by painting all the red nuns green, has fallen on deaf ears.
Fog. Now rain. What's next, locusts? The radar screen, pictured on the left, shows us in the midst of rain showers with a thunderstorm 5nm off to starboard.
What's very different about this coastal region is the long harbor approach channels. For example, once we reached St. Marks' outer marker, we were still 10nm away from town. What's nice about these long approaches is that the wave height decreases the closer in you get. This is the very antitheses of a bar crossing. I'm good with that :-)
St Marks is the St Augustine of Florida's Gulf Coast. It too was conquered by conquistadors; settled by the Catholic Church, taken over by the British; and on the side of the South in the Civil War. So much history, so little time to study it all.
56nm today and 530nm to date. DBH
