St. Augustine, FL

14 April 2015

Today we go to St. Augustine. At only 15 miles it’s one of our shortest days in awhile. It brings back memories of short 6 and 7 mile trips between islands in the North Channel.

We had a good current flow behind us so the trip was short at 2 hours. High point of the voyage was two adult and a baby dolphin. It was neat to see the big leaps and this tiny body coming after them.

We got into the dock and found that the wireless is really good. That and getting here at 10AM gave me the morning and part of the afternoon to get caught up on blog posts. I’m current except to talk more about the broken shaft from two weeks ago.

Lunch was at the A1A brewery, we both had cheese soup and the Crab BLT. They had five beers on tap and of course I did a flight of them (their IPA was my favorite).

I spent some time with my hosting service and the speed of QVMarine. It’s been running 6-8 seconds for the user facing pages and about 10 for the internal pages. It appears to be more of a “Wordpress is a pig” issue than anything else. I’m going to post on the WP tech support site to see if they have any suggestions.

I made some minor changes with the caching and I got rid of some calls to external fonts that I wasn’t using, so we’ll see how that works out.

While I was doing bloggy things, Susan was out walking around the town. She reported back with a number of places she wanted to go to but were closed on Mon/Tuesday, so we decided to stay one more day and check things out.

We went to JP Henly for beers instead of Docktails. They have about 70 beers on tap and about twice that in bottles/cans. I got 8 samples to try, all of which were pretty good. It was crowded when we got there, but it turns out from 4-6 their $6 pints are only $4, hence the crowd. When we were ready to go at 6:10 PM the place was almost empty.

Dinner was at Harry’s, it’s mostly Cajun style food. We started off with Voodoo shrimp, it was nothing like any other Voodoo Shrimp. The 8 shrimp came in a cast iron pan about 4” across, bubbling in a brown sauce. The sauce was very flavorful, but with spices, not with the pepper burn that I’ve associated with Voodoo Shrimp in the past. The best method to eat was to take the toasted bread slices, dip them in the sauce and perch a shrimp on top. Perfect!

Susan had the Shrimp and Grits, they were sweet grits because they had put sweet corn kernels into the corn meal (the grits part). The sauce had a really great flavor. I had the Jambalaya, it had a ton of shrim, chicken and sausage. I’d ordered a side of Maque Choux (since I’d never had it as that name). Its a mix of corn, peppers and onions in a buttery cream sauce. A great companion to both of our dishes. We were to full to eat the Oreo beignets, and we knew that getting them to go would be a failure. Another time.

While we were eating Cajun food our discussion turned to the crew of Moondance. They had been the leaders of the epic “Mississippi / Ohio and Lock 52” flotilla. It’s interesting how food takes us back to places and people that we’ve met on the trip. A few days ago, “Midas Touch” crossed their wake and mentioned butter tarts and we were instantly transported back to Canada. Ahh butter tarts, how I miss thee.

After dinner we walked a little of the downtown area, it will be nice to hit some of the shops when they are open on Wednesday. Just need to hope the rain holds off.

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