SHIP'S LOG:
I haven't move a foot since yesterday so the Lat/Lon hasn't changed but I must have cruised a few miles back and forth at the end on my anchor rode. The wind basically howled all day. It was a steady 20+ with gusts up to 35 and those were just the ones I was able to record! And ABISHAG has a lot of windage(above water structures) and tends to "sail" at anchor. She swings from one side to the other until the rode brings her up short and then does it again. I spent the whole day going back and forth in, thankfully, an empty anchorage. Who knows, perhaps I did a couple of miles 90 feet at a time!
I did lay in my course for the next hop. It will be up to Daytona. It will be a jaunt of about 41 miles and shortly after passing New Smyrna Beach, I will re-visit a spot of my last grounding. I have no desire to visit the actual spot as I have no desire to see the guys in the Red Towboat again, but I will slowly and carefully cruise by it. Hopefully, and this is a terrible thing to say, another boat will be just ahead of me and proceed through the spot so that I can be sure I have the right line. This particular spot of my grounding is the one where the shoal is actually in the channel between two buoys. Thus it is not even a matter of staying in the channel, it is also a matter of staying in the right spot in the channel.
I saw less than a dozen boats pass by while I was anchored today. Most of the traffic was sailboats moving north. I would surmise that the great northward migration has begun. This is also supported by the fact that most of the north bound boats were Canadian.
I could stay here a couple of more days but the anchorage in Daytona is a little small and with the weekend coming, I want to try to get a good spot. I will be there for several days as the next stop will be Palm Coast just a hop, skip & a jump up the Magenta Highway and I can't get there before the 5th of April. And it's a good thing too. It is preventing me from rushing back too fast and "forcing" me to enjoy each day and everything it has to offer. There are a lot of worse ways to spend my time!