12/15/14
Fernandina Beach FL
Posted by Bill

We started the day, me drinking coffee and Tricia her juice, sitting in the cockpit and watching the water. Of course…more dolphins, just off of the boat.

Then we went ashore to go to the historic courthouse and get our Florida drivers license.

We established residency a few months ago, and Florida law states that you must get a drivers license within 60 days (I think that is what it was). It was important to have the drivers license at this time primarily because it establishes proof of residency for tax purposes, and we needed to also register to vote. So we did all of that and then went to lunch, then back to the boat so I could charge the batteries. This is pretty much the cruiser routine at anchor when you are not in transit, although most people have solar panels and wind generators to keep the batteries charged up. We wanted to wait until we got to the east coast to get solar. There is just not that many people in Ohio who sell and understand marine solar power, so when we settle down somewhere for a week or so, we will tackle getting solar panels.

The town of Fernandina Beach is very nice. There is a plethora of restaurants, most of them with really good ratings on Yelp. Two of them are old gas stations:


A cool church.

There are also lots of shops with all different flavors of stuff to blow your money on…not our thing if you couldn’t tell. At this time, I’d just like to say…God bless Tricia for being a woman that doesn’t like to shop!

Here are some street scenes:




The oldest bar in Florida, The Palace Saloon:

Some excellent wisdom from our forefathers. Please pass this around:

The Salty Pelican, where we ate last night…great food!

The dinghy dock:

The town Christmas Tree. They also have a nativity scene on public property…I love it!!!

Christmas is so different here. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas at all. I guess after so many years of what we experienced in Ohio this is going to be foreign, but I like it!

Then there are the birds. There are tons of birds all over the place, mostly cormorants, pelicans and gulls. This guy was feeding the pelicans scraps from his fish cleaning. They were standing around like dogs do waiting for something to fall. It was comical.

The weather is getting back to normal here but is still cooler that it usually is. Most are saying that next week will be close to normal. In the seventies today and lots of sunshine all week. This is the primary reason we are here and are tired of the lows in the 40s! After all…we are in Florida now! Lol!