Fernandina

Fernandina Beach Public Library
N 30.671964 W -081.462373 (see the map)

Well it's a sunny, quiet Sunday morning and we stopped at Fernandina. This is one of our favored stops along the ICW.

Fernandina is a place with a split personality. On one hand it is a factory town, flanked by two big stinky paper mills on each side. Many cruisers never stop here because that makes it sound unappealing. Actually, it's pretty rare that the stink or the sight of the paper mills intrudes on one's experience here. They don't matter much.

A second personality is that of a tourist town. The small downtown near the city docks is filled with little restaurants and shops selling touristy stuff. Actually, it is two steps classier than St Augustine. The downtown is particularly beautiful in December when all decked out for Christmas.

A third personality is as a provisioning stop. There is a Publix supermarket, a Wal Mart and a West Marine about three miles from the city docks. That's a bit far, but not too bad if you have a bicycle.

The city marina recently (three weeks ago) installed a mooring field where most of the transient boats used to anchor free. The moorings cost $15/day. Normally I would be teed off by thatn but this time it doesn't bother us much. I heard two stories about cruisers dragging anchor in that spot where tides can be very high and currents very swift and anchor standoffs small. We preferred to move a few hundred meters up the creek out of the way from all that. We can still to that today.

Fernandina Beach is also the home of Tiger Point Boatyard where we spent considerable time two years ago. We still have friends, Ingemar from Sweden, and Bert, and our favorite nonconformist Baird. They all live here in Fernandina.


p.s. The sky is blue again this morning. The smoke cloud moved away. However visibility is only about 3 miles so there must be quite of bit of smoke in the air. I just heard on the news that Georgie shut down US highway 1 because of the smoke.