Bottomed out at Jax Beach

We were delayed due to weather but continued on with our plan to stay the night at Jax Beach. We traveled on the ICW and landed at Jax Beach Marina. No issues coming into the Marina as it was a side tie on a face dock. No issues with water depth, life is good. We decided to go to the beach it was 2 miles away, we will walk almost any distance to get to a beach. In fact that’s why we picked this stop, chose beach or free Jacksonville City Dock.

The pier was being renovated and the waterfront had a boardwalk with a park with a festival being set up for the weekend. After walking that far, we just imagined having a frozen cocktail on the beach. We were so thirsty and searched for an open restaurant or bar but to no avail. We would have had to walk another half mile to Margaritaville. Well, the heck with that! So instead, we headed back to the marina and did our provisioning along the way with stops at Dollar Tree, Publix and the ATT store.

It was low tide when we returned, and our depth finder read 1ft! We were on the bottom! It was then we realized that as we go north the tides are much bigger and we need to take that into account, when traveling, and selecting a marina even if it is a floating dock. Fortunately, the tide started to rise quite quickly and of course, there was no damage as we were docked and not underway.

It’s our “thing” to always support the restaurant nearest to the Marina, kind of makes us feel like we are “leaving our mark”. There was a restaurant across the channel, Dockside Seafood, it was crowded and there were boats coming and going all day long, so we figured the food had to be good. Then we found out it was a mile to get the by walking or launch the dinghy and head over, well after walking to the beach we were way too tired for that. Luckily, Nancy found a food truck on premise with “bbq”, her favorite and we ate there and it was excellent.