We pulled in to St Augustine a week ago. Our plan was to sail offshore from Charleston to here in two hops, but that plan got changed. As sailing plans nearly always do.
Our first hop from Charleston to Fernandina Beach / St Mary’s was a pleasant overnight with no wind, resulting in another night of motoring. We pulled into the gigantic inlet mid-morning with a rising tide and meandered up to St Mary’s where we dropped the anchor, and I began planning our departure the next day.
As it happened, the tides and currents would make it difficult to leave early in the morning, and an approaching weather system would make it dangerous to wait until later in the day, so we called an audible. We pulled up the anchor and started motoring down the ICW, dropping anchor again off Amelia City in a place called Alligator Creek. We spend a pleasant night there, then motored further south the next day to a little oxbow that curves around Pine Island. Our third day was a quick 15 miles or so to St Augustine, where we settled in to the Municipal Marina for a month.
We took the marina rather than anchoring or mooring as a strategic move in our effort to find a way to get vaccinated. Traveling back to CO when our turn came up seemed overly risky, not to mention that in meant we’d just have to sit and wait somewhere then buy expensive last-minute tickets when we got notified by Kaiser that our turn was up in CO. We needed to find a different way.
We’d heard that Florida was pretty loose with their vaccinations, maybe even encouraging people to travel there to get the vaccination. Since the federal government is footing the bill for all of the vaccinations, that seemed like a reasonable way for them to try and encourage travel to their state.
Don’t get me wrong on this. I’m not a fan at all of the way that Florida’s governor and legislature has behaved during this pandemic. They’ve done all they can to downplay the pandemic and encourage people to continue to travel and behave as-if nothing was wrong. That attitude is apparent here in Florida, where very few people behave responsibly. Bars are full, streets are full of mask-less people, and even restaurant workers are not wearing masks. There is no doubt in my mind that people have died as a result of the reckless and immoral leadership here in Florida.
But that rumor that they had created a bit of an underground “vaccine tourism” intrigued us. We wondered if it’d be faster to get vaccinated in Florida. So we started investigating, and found that indeed, Florida had scheduled group 1c to start soon, meaning that since we are over 65 we’d be eligible. At the same time, the information we read on the web indicated that they were also cracking down on the “vaccine tourism”, and you’d have to meet certain residency requirements. Specifically, if we were in Florida seasonally, we would be eligible for a vaccine if we could show a rent receipt and a utility receipt. Well, by checking in to the marina we would pay rent, and we’d pay for a utility hookup, so that should qualify us. I called the county and the state for guidance, and the folks I talked to seemed to think the logic made sense.
Hence, our decision to come to the marina here for a month.
And it worked. We were able to snag an appointment at the Community Center, which was a lucky. It was one of those online lottery things where you had to go in exactly when they opened it, and hope that the site let you in to set an appointment. We kept refreshing, snuck in, and set two appointments. Then we headed south from Charleston to give ourselves plenty of time to get here for our appointment.
The day of our appointment we walked to the community center, which was a little over three miles, half of it through neighborhoods of questionable degrees of savoriness. We stood in line, walked up to the desk ready to prove our temporary residency, and the gal waved us aside and said that proving such a thing wasn’t necessary—if we’d been able to sign up we must be residents.
And so we were vaccinated, with an appointment for a second vaccination.
I read stories about old folks who are struggling to figure out how to get the vaccine. I get it. We’re slightly tech savvy, (at least for our age) so we were able to navigate the online process. The majority of older folks would probably have no idea how to play that game successfully.
Here’s a great article from NPR about this exact topic today.
As my son Jesse lamented when I was with him a while back, why on earth couldn’t we use our existing data to get folks vaccinated? The vast majority of folks 65 and older are on Medicare. Technically everyone over 65 is, though I am sure there are some who are not registered with Medicare. Medicare knows who we are, where we live, and how to get hold of us. Why not simply use our existing data to get the job done? Why force each state to play hide and seek with folks, trying to find them or trying to get shots into their arms? It’s a crime and a shame that we didn’t have someone running the Federal government when this was all getting set up in December and January who had a brain big enough to figure this out.
My next post will talk more about the city here, though I must say that our shock at the degree of pandemic denial here makes it very hard for us to say good things about the city. I’m hoping my disgust moderates for my next post.
