2014 Florida Cruise: St, Augustine, Florida

Today we are heading for St. Augustine -- our plan is to get there early, take a mooring at the municipal marina and tour the town.

St Augustine bills itself a the oldest "continuously occupied European settlement" in America -- a mouthful. Settled in 1565, it will be 450 years old next year -- that's very old for anything American. It should have called itself the "hottest bargaining chit in the New World". Originally settled by the Spanish, the city (and by extension, Florida itself), was never actually taken by force during the struggles to colonize the New World even though it was attacked many times. Rather, it was traded by Spain to England (for Havana), then ceded back to Spain by England at the end of the Revolutionary War and perhapos a decade later traded by Spain back to the U.S. in return for a defined border in the west between the two countries.

The city has gone to great lengths to preserve its history and tell its story -- there are many historical attractions in town: the Spanish fort, a colonial history quarter, many preserved buildings and street from the Spanish and colonial eras, a schoolhouse that dates from the early 1700's, the cleverly named Ponce De Leon Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park (which is supposedly built on the spot that he first landed in Florida and, among many other things, will sell you some water from a local spring).

The trip was pretty routine -- we have become used to seeing dolphins continuously along the Intercoastal and were not disappointed. The only other notable event was navigating across the St. Augustine inlet to get to the city, which is situated behind an island just south of the inlet entrance. Like many inlets, this one is small and has a bad shoaling problem -- so bad that the charts don't show a path for the Intercoastal because the buoys move so frequently -- the guidebook made it sound very difficult to navigate, but it was well-marked and straightforward (a good thing!).

Scene along the way: was this boat abandoned or anchored in a creek we couldn't see -- we'll never know !!

What was notable was that we had to make "right turn" in the mouth of the inlet to go up and around the island -- coming into the turn we were doing over 7 knots; after the turn we could barely do 3.5 -- the inlet was on full ebb. Once around the turn, we were in a race with time to get through the next bascule bridge -- if we didn't get within 8 minutes, the tender told us we would half to wait the half hour for the next opening. It was an agonizingly slow race but we made it (with the tender's help, he graciously delayed his opening by a couple of minutes) -- shortly after we exited the bridge we were on a mooring at our marina home for the visit.

Just before the bridge, this 200' high cross supposedly marks the spot where the city's founder, Pedro Aviles, first set foot on land

The St. Augustine bascule bridge, the most attractive of all we've seen on the Intercoastal

We caught a launch shuttle in (the marina's launch service only runs every other hour) and toured the town. We started by taking the "red train", a 45 minute open jitney ride round the town that points out all of the major attractions -- a bit hokey but it did give us a good feeling for the town's layout and helped us pick what we really wanted to see.

We then spent the rest of the day walking around to visit what interested us, namely: George Street (the Main Street of the city's colonial period), an 18th century one room schoolhouse, the St. Photios National Shrine of the Greek Orthodox Church (commemorates the first Greek Orthodox settlers in the New World -- see the Blog entry for New Smyrna for the full story), the fort that defended the city during the colonial period and always managed to repel any invaders (Castillo de San Marcos) and a reproduction of the colonial village.