The End of The Buddy Boat Road

Monday January 14, 2013

The day that I have been dreading for quite awhile now has come.  Our good friends on Rode Trip will be leaving tomorrow to continue on their way south while we continue to sit here waiting for boat repairs to finish.  We’re very happy for them at the same time, since they’ve gone through just as much heartache as us getting to this point, and now we’ll be able to live vicariously through them as they get into the islands.  Before we could say good-bye though, there had to be at least one more night out on the town.

Planning to meet at a little bar near me on the waterfront that was supposed to be famous for having over 100 different kinds of beer on tap, Matt and I biked over to find that this is the one day they were closed to host their annual holiday party.  Texting Brian and Stephanie we found them in the park across the street and tried to plan a new location.  The night was fairly warm with barely any wind, and I had remembered a nice outdoor patio that we had passed a few times as soon as we got to St. Augustine, and I really wanted to go back and check it out.  Having Matt be the one between the two of us that knew the directions for once, we found the place on a little cobblestone street behind the main drag.

Saddling up to a table and ordering some Irish beers we went through Rode Trip’s game plan, probably more excited about it than they were.  If weather window held up, they’d be hitting the Gulf Stream 24 hours from that moment, and after a few days of heading south, checking into the Bahamas.  We were so jealous.  But while speaking on topics of customs and crew lists, we were interrupted by a guy at the bar that had just an eensy bit too much to drink.  After everyone sitting at the bar had gone and there was no one left to talk to, he started making his rounds at the tables.  If you want a mental picture, think of Larry the Cable Guy, redneck accent and all, with so much to drink that he could barely stand up.  He actually ended up staying so long talking to us, I’m not sure if everyone else at the table found him entertaining or was too afraid to tell him to leave, that the bartender eventually had to come over, cut him off, and close down the bar.

So our last night out with Brian and Stephanie happened be cut short by a drunken hillbilly that kept ranting about the bar he owned down in Ormond Beach (I’ll give you a hint, it’s named after a fuzzy creature that likes to build damns), and slinging around the N-word even though there was someone at the table behind us that should have been even more offended by it than we were (and we were).  But on the flip side, it will be a great story to bring up the next time we all meet up, hopefully while grilling fresh caught fish from our cockpits while floating in kool-aid blue waters.  We’re hoping we can get back in the water soon enough to catch up, although it will probably mean a much shorter trip to the Bahamas than we were originally planning.  Back at the docks it was very hard to say good-bye to friends that we had traveled nearly 1,000 miles of the same coastline with, but I have to believe that even if things don’t go as planned this season,  somewhere on this big blue marble, we’ll meet up again someday.

*Editor’s Note:  Rode Trip did leave out the St. Augustine inlet on 1/15/13 (with no issues, yay!), but after a change in the weather window they did not make the Gulf crossing but instead followed the Florida coast and ended up in Lake Worth after 2.5 days of sailing.