Woke up at 6:45 am. We got underway quickly. About an hour into the trip Tom noticed something was wrong with the steering again. He said it was fine for now, but something was off.

I downloaded a waterway guide on my phone and it helped us get through different shoaling areas. St Augustine was beautiful. I wish we could have spent the night in one of the mooring fields there. We had to wait an hour for the Bridge of Lions to open. The bride tender was ornery. There were six boats waiting for the bridge to open.

We anchored about 5 miles outside of St Augustine in a creepy anchorage in Matanzas river off of marker R18. There is about a dozen wrecked ships and derelict boats. It’s sad to see. Some of them looked so nice and I don’t understand why they were abandoned. It was the only anchorage I could find that we could get into with how deep our draft is. I really really wanted to anchor at Fort Matanzas, but my charts warned me that there was a 5 foot shoal at the entrance that we can’t clear. We only got about 35 miles today, but It ended up being a smart thing with the steering issues.

We pulled too far into the anchorage by a 2 foot shoal. A guy in a dinghy came over from his sail boat and said that we were in a bad spot and we were too close to the sandbar. I was so grateful he let us know. I pulled the anchor up and we moved to a better spot.

Tom looked at the steering cables and they were completely messed up again. They were twisted all over the drum and some of them weren’t on the drum at all. We had to completely redo the steering again. I stubbed my finger pretty badly looping the cables on the drum, but it’s better than the horrible cuts I had on my hands the last time.

The steering is not quite finished yet. Tom has a few finishing touches on it tomorrow. There’s supposed to be a thunderstorm tomorrow first thing in the morning.

We saw some more dolphins today in our anchorage.

There was a lovely sunset this evening. I made clam linguini for dinner. We are hoping to get to Daytona Beach tomorrow if we can get the steering fixed early enough.