Green Cove Springs, Florida is not the place to visit in the summer or anytime really. There is really nothing here and you have to drive out to Jacksonville or St. Augustine to get to places you want to see or go. The weather was always hot and humid with afternoon thunderstorms in the summer. You really can't be outside very long from noon till 4pm due to the extreme heat and humidity so we would go to the nicely air conditioned stores to pick up supplies and food. The marina was sufficient for our purposes with free wi-fi, air conditioned bathrooms & showers and a laundry room. There was only one shower so if someone was in there you had to get in line, this was the same case for the men's bathroom and worse in the fact they only had one bathroom stall with many men waiting to use the bathroom especially in the morning. But you must have a car to get places because nothing is close enough to walk to especially in the summer heat. There is definitely no night life if you want to be social, but there surely is a lot of wildlife here. Tons of mosquitoes and other insects during all hours of the day and even more after the rains have passed. I helped get baby turtles newly hatched into the river as they traversed the marina grounds. Baby rabbits running free in the tall grasses on the outer edges of the marina, which one was killed by a boaters dog. Cats roaming the marina, who may or may not have owners. Cicadas, frogs, and birds providing a symphony of sounds mainly at night. And one really old and lonely yellow Labrador barking with it's wheezing kind of bark that sounds like it has asthma and has been smoking for years. It would bark at everything and everyone and once we found it had gotten loose from its leash and was walking around the marina barking at everyone it passed until an old hand at the marina took him back to it's owner, who was still asleep. Most days we were the only ones working on our boat, but we met a couple others who worked on their boats after they got out of work. Chuck was a neighbor in the work yard, who would come after work to make progress on his boat every day the weather was good and even sometimes when it was not. One other person who was a regular worker was Hyott and he had sailed before to the Caribbean and South America. We heard many outrageous stories about his adventures in many places that I wouldn't dare visit. But he didn't care about the restricted areas and the places deemed unsafe for travelers for he loved the flora and fauna of the locations and it was always worth the trip even when he encountered machine gun toting individuals guarding their ganja fields. The rest of the people in the marina just lived in their run down boats in the work yard with a few exceptions of the people who worked at the marina and lived in their boats at the very few wet slips available due to the condemnation of the docks due to safety concerns. The moorings at Green Cove Springs are really close to each other so you need to be careful who you moor next to and their boats tendencies with both wind and current factors. The moment we got our boat into the water, we felt so much cooler with the wind and water helping to keep our boat bearable in the August heat as we had to do without air conditioning due to the lack of shore power. The wind generator helped us keep our batteries charged enough to use the lights and fans in the boat while we were in the water. Every day we worked from sun up to sun down and sometimes into the night so we could get our boat into the water. We worked very hard, but it felt good and rewarding to see the products of all our hard work. We could see we made a difference every day we worked, which we didn't see very much at our jobs. The stress I had from my job was released with my work on the boat. I felt so much lighter and happier even with all the hard work I did. It was definitely worth all the suffering in the summer heat and humidity of Florida. Once we did get Frodo into the water we could relax and not work so hard. We were elated to find we had no leaks in the hull and our boat was water tight after we reconditioned and installed the seacocks. Soon we finished all that we deemed necessary to get to Miami and we left on a Thursday morning as we were told it was bad luck to leave on a Friday. It was unfortunate timing that a big rain storm hit us three times on our way to Jacksonville, but we made it there just fine in ~5 hours at 5 mph on the St. James River and Intracoastal Waterway. Green Cove Springs was behind us now and we were ready to see another place!
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