Ohio

We decided to hire a car and do a bit of a road trip to visit some friends and do a bit of camping and are discovering that this is a big and spectacular country with amazing forests and scenery. The old owners of Sunflower now live in Ripley Ohio so we of course had to catch up with them and see how they are. We left on the worst possible day, tropical storm "Julia" had just passed over us the night before and was heading north the way we were also headed and after driving for 7 hours we finally passed through it into clear skies we ended up in a State National Park on Lake Murray where we camped in a beautiful spot for a couple of nights and just hung out BBQing, walking and trying to catch a fish.

From there we drove up through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and then into Ohio over some beautiful mountains, farmland and forest, everything is so lush and green and all tuned into the local radio stations that only seem to play country and western which I have to say slowly drives me nuts but definitely sets the scene. Was great to see Al and Beth in Ripley, very nice old rustic little town on the river that is the border for Kentucky. They couldn't have made us more welcome and showed us around their area and introduced us to their friends was a great 3 days, thank you so much! One of the highlights for me was going to a shrimp harvest. They have these fresh water shrimps in ponds on a farm and harvest them at the end of summer draining the pond completely. It's a big day with a lot of the locals coming down to help and buy and I reckon they would have got close to getting a ton of shrimp from the one pond as well as a heap of frogs they collect to eat and a little turtle they release somewhere else, the kids were having a blast anyway. Al also showed us his giant pumpkin he has been growing the last few months of the summer! He says it's about 750 pounds! Another very interesting thing was the tobacco fields which we had never seen, all in all it was a busy few days😀

Now we are heading of camping again and then onto seeing some other friends in North Carolina

Al and Beth in there garden amongst the Sunflowers!

Tobacco hanging to dry

Als pumpkin 

Shrimp harvest 

Some guy that paints amazing murals for a living around the whole country

ICW

After 7 weeks work back in Aus I was ready to get back that's for sure. Julie had done an amazing job as usual bringing the best out of Sunflower while I was away and had the dodger rebuilt with new clears with her new sewing machine. She had made a bunch of new friends in Marathon who we had a few drinks with over the week we were there and I also fitted the new Simrad radar which seems to work a treat. The bottom of the boat was filthy and had grown its own coral reef while I was away so that was the other job on the to do list. We waited for favourable winds to sail up the coast but it was all NE so we just waited till it was light and motor sailed up to Miami over a few days and had the weekend there, it's a great town for a couple of days, chaos but good fun. We checked out the Happy Hours around on the main beach ended up in one that Layla recommended and it's actually free drinks for an hour!! Tipped him $20 and he looked after us alright:) We also went into Little Havana, bought lots of clothes that we both probably didn't need and hung out. It's a pretty cool town, FULL of Latinos from all over amongst everyone else from around the globe would have to be the most multicultural city I've ever been to that's for sure.  Then we did an overnight sail up to Fort Pierce and entered the Intra Coastal Waterway or ICW as the locals call it. You can travel from right at the bottom of Florida to the very top of the US east coast on this waterway if you like with entrances normally at rivers or cutouts along the way. The depths on the charts show 2.7m all the way and we've always had a metre+ under our keel which is pretty amazing when you think about it. They built it for back it the days of cargo transport but we are yet to see any barges being pushed along so far in the 150nm we've done but hopefully we will. There's a good few bridges, most with a clearance of 65 feet+ and a few that open on demand in daylight hours and the bridge masters all seem a real happy bunch stoked to see us come through. In the American winter time apparently it's super busy with yachts but except for the weekends it seems to be empty with a lot of boats in storage for the hurricane season. Talking of Hurricanes there is one going on tonight as I write crossing the gulf and coming across the land and becoming a tropical storm that is going to pass north of us but give us some pretty crappy weather by the looks of it but we have to expect this for the next month or two.

We are now in st Augustine which was first settled in 1565 and they say is the oldest town in the US. It's a very pretty town with nice sheltered harbour with a big old fort looking over it and plenty of bars with Happy Hours also with beers from $2😀!! 

We have a few jobs to do which we are slowly ticking off the list and plan at the moment to stay here a while, maybe hire a car and do some touring to see some friends from this side of the planet.

Miami

ST Augustine Bridge