January 2026: We didn’t actually leave from Brunswick; we left from somewhere better. Saying goodbye to the Jekyll Island community was genuinely hard, but we made it happen. From there we cruised the ICW south to Fernandina Beach: easy, pretty, lovely, comfortable. All the things our last stint on the ICW was not.
We motored slowly, anchored, and rested for the night. (This stop lacked all the fun stuff from our last stop in Fernandina in November 2025 when we had a haul out and bottom job: a park with a proper playground and a brew pub with craft beer and freshly baked pizza.)
St. Augustine came next: cold and grey, epic current in the river, an eventual move to a mooring ball. But what did we find at anchor? Some reconnections with already friends and some new boat families we’d end up craving more time with. This life is strange in a lot of ways, but one of the stranger things about it is a particular kind of isolation: surrounded in close proximity by layers of humanity and yet the sustained connections are harder to build than you’d think.
We’ve met genuinely wonderful people. Fellow sailors learning by doing, families figuring out the same things at the same time that we are, anchorage friends who show up when you need them. I think we’re both pretty outgoing people (maybe less so as we get older, lol), and it’s served us well. But we’ve never quite found our buddy boat yet (the family moving at the same pace, with the same work-week vibe and weekend energy and aligned values). What we’ve done instead is bungie boat: stretching apart, snapping back together, a few days here and a week there with other couples or families we love. Never quite in the same spot long enough to find a real rhythm, though.
Is that too much to ask? Asking for a friend. (The friend is us.)
Honestly, we’re grateful for every connection we find, and we hope to spend real time with some of our favorite families again before long.
But in St. Augustine, it got cold. Colder and windier than we wanted to wait out. A weather window opened for West Palm Beach and a potential Bahamas crossing later in the week.
So we took it. The official start of our 2026 season. More on that soon.
