Day 296, Monday April 14th Fernandina Florida

Day 296, Monday April 14th

We wake up to a not bad looking day but gone are the days of waking up and putting on our bathing suits.  How sad.  Have we made the right decision?   Should we have waited a couple more weeks to cross?   We are just learning now that by around May 1^st all the cold fronts should be done and the weather much more settled for crossings.  It seems like for the last 3 weeks we have been chased by the weather.   Constantly re-anchoring, and having to schedule life around the winds.

We get our day going early as we need to check in and clear customs.  We have been assigned an arrival number via phone, but need to present ourselves to the office here in Fernandina Beach on Amelie Island which is on the border between Georgia and Florida.  We are almost packed up with all our essentials when Dawson is called over to the neighbour boat Windward and they proceed to have a discussion about re-anchoring.  Meanwhile Julie is waiting and waiting for her pickup.  This is not a good thing.  Finally Dawson arrives 45 minutes later to announce we are moving the boat about a mile downstream.  Julie is not happy at all as now we will not have internet and we will be about 2 miles from town which will not be conducive to easily and dryly getting our errands done.  It takes us 2 hours to re-anchor and be content that all is well with the world, so now it is almost 11:00 when we set out for customs and our “breakfast” in town.

Grocery shopping with great choices

First stop is customs which goes very smoothly.  Second stop is the coffee shop to post some blogs and attempt to get our AT&T data plan set up using the coffee shops wifi.  The blogging goes okay, but the dataplan is a bust.  AT&T tells us our sim card has expired.  We don’t think so, but decide we will head over to the AT&T office a couple miles away later in the afternoon.  We do a few more errands such as getting a visa gift card for paying for our dataplan (as we can register it with a USA address), and going to the hardware store to buy a few repair items.  We meet up with our boating buddies shortly after 3 to head to the grocers and phone store a couple miles away via taxi.

Loading up the groceries

We have success getting a cell plan, but no dataplan yet, although they indicate our sim card in the Ipad appears to be okay.  We are sure it is a conspiracy, but the visa gift card will not let us activate until 24 hours after purchase (even though you have to pay for it with cash)!  We needed the visa gift card to pay for the dataplan as we register the visa card with a USA address.  Guess we will have to wait until tomorrow.

The grocery store has everything we want, not just what we need which has been the norm for the last 6 months.  The 5 of us pile back into the taxi, then into the dinghies, then into our respective motherships to put all our purchases away.  A simple life, but more complicated sometimes.  By now it is evening, so once groceries are away, and dinner cooked it is past boaters midnight. 

Cheers

Julie and Dawson