Nov. 17 - Leave early for St. Catherine’s Sound. Wind is light and seas calm. Whatever wind we had dies when we leave the exit channel and turn South, so it’s the "iron jenny" (engine for the non-sailors) today. Our course takes us right by the sea buoy at the Tybee Roads (Savannah River) entrance and as we approach it, dense fog sets in. Savannah is a major shipping port and I am riveted to the AIS (Automatic Identification System) targets entering and leaving the entrance channel, all of which have to pass right by the sea buoy. Learn that the big ships all monitor and respond on VHF Channel 13, but not always on 16. Anyway we are delayed while we wait in place a little away from the sea buoy unable to see anything in the fog for one 895 ft. long ship (AIS tells me its length) to leave the entrance channel and another to enter it. Just as they do the fog lifts and we continue on our way in oily calm seas. My concern becomes having to go into St. Catherine’s Sound in the dense fog if it returns and I watch the horizon intently. After a while the sun comes out, the water is becoming more and more medium green rather than dark blue, and the dolphins are all over the place. Let the autopilot take over and except for worrying about getting into St. Catherine’s its an effortless passage. The Cruising Guides say that St. Catherine’s has shifting shoals, and to stay away without local knowledge, but the chart shows plenty of water and a call to local TowBoat US captain tells us there is no shoaling in the channel at this time. We get to St. Catherine’s and there’s no fog. Shrimp trawler looks like he’s going to go in in front of me but doesn’t answer the radio so I press on and he goes in another direction. Entrance requires concentration and "threading the needle" a little bit (no water on either side of channel), but is not difficult and we come into Walburg Creek without difficulty. It’s absolutely beautiful and serene and we drop the anchor in 18 ft. of water in the middle of the creek with not a soul or structure around (although plenty of dolphins). In fact, the dolphins are everywhere, both in the ocean and in the ICW. They are our constant companions. Now, as they said at the end of Looney Tunes, "the, the, the that’s all folks", at least for Nov. 18, 2013.
Nov. 18 - It’s going to turn very nasty tonight (high winds and seas and quite cold for the next few days) and it’s supposed to rain and thunderstorm this afternoon. It’s pea soup fog in the Inlet and the I ICW when we get ready to leave. Strangely there’s little or no fog in Walburg Creek, so we motor back in to see when it will lift and to figure out what to do. Worst case scenario we can stay in Walburg Creek, but we’d be exposed to the wind, which is supposed to be from the North and we wouldn’t be able to run heat after we went to bed. (I won’t run the generator while we’re sleeping as a safety precaution). Anyway, by the time the fog lifts it’s too late to leave to get to St. Simon’s Inlet (Jekyll Island going on the outside; there are no marina’s in range on the ICW going South and we’d be getting to some really nasty stretches on the ICW at the wrong tides, so we decide to backtrack a little to a marina on the Kilkenny Creek, just a little North of St. Catherine’s Inlet. It’s really "up a creek" and very rustic and simple, but deep at the dock and well protected. No civilization for 6 miles around. We meet a number of very nice other cruising people including a 52 year old retired guy named Moby on a 22 ft. Catalina down from Maine (the Casco Bay area) and a couple from the West Coast. We share some adult beverages with Moby and a bunch of stories as the sun goes down.
Nov. 19 - There’s a large group of snowy egrets that live in the area and all flew into a large tree right by where we were docked to sleep for the night. It reminded me of a Christmas Tree with a whole slew of huge white ornaments when I woke up. We leave at 7:30 along with Moby and another boat that he’s traveling with. Weather is as predicted. Blowing a steady 20/25 with gusts reaching gale force (35). We’re staying in the ICW. It’s a lot of work just the same and we face a number of shoaling places on this part of our trip so we’re only going to travel at ½ tide or better. The plan is to get to the Crescent River anchorage today and then Brunswick tomorrow. We could go a lot further today, but that would put us in trouble areas at less than ½ tide. The run through Sapelo Sound is particularly difficult as it’s wide open to the sea and the wind. Can’t really say this day is fun. It’s a lot of work and concentration. We do sail along with Moby and the other boats for the first part of the trip (having left last I’m in the rear), but we’re all bunched up as we exit St. Catherine Sound and I become the lead boat so I no longer follow the progress of the others. We get into Crescent River with no problem and get fair protection from the wind and total protection from any wave action. We anchor in what seems like 14 ft. of water in the middle of the River and I put my head down for an hour. When I wake up we’ve swung across the River and we only have 7.2 ft. of water at pretty much dead low tide. It’s enough for us technically (we draw 6 feet), but I’m not comfortable and we re-anchor where I get 11 ft. at low tide when we swing. Nonetheless, I’m not so sure how well I’ll sleep tonight. Forget what the weatherman predicts, as we all know, he/she is only right 50% of the time or less.
Nov. 20 - It’s blowing more than predicted and more than yesterday. Steady 20 mph plus with gust to 30. It’s cold, and this is not what I signed on for, but forward is the only way to go. We get through some really dicey ICW sections (low water at high water times and not where the charts indicate, etc.) and then we work our way into Brunswick, Georgia to the Brunswick Landing Marina. It’s out of the current but not out of the wind and we suffer some damage to our bow pulpit and anchor chock assembly when the dock crew puts me on a downwind dock and totally drops the ball handling the lines when we come in. I’m aggravated as hell, but I guess it’s just part of what happens. Anyway, we’re warm and safe; I fix a problem with our battery charger and go to sleep exhausted, but thankfully not with an eye half open for a dragging anchor or other unforseen eventualities since we’re at a dock. We need a few days to regroup. We’ve been traveling for six days (five nights on an anchor) and we need a break.
Nov. 21&22 - Brunswick is a somewhat weird town. There’s a big industrial plant in plain view spewing smoke all day and night but the wind’s blowing it away from us, so no big deal. The railroad comes right through the center of town in front of the marina and trains sirens wail a good part of the night and early morning. The town has a few streets, some of which we are told not to explore, but there’s a beautiful old courthouse in the center of town with absolutely the most enormous live oaks we’ve ever seen covered with Spanish moss. They’re absolutely gorgeous. In fact, now that we’ve explored more of the town, the whole town is full of these very large very pretty live oaks covered in moss. Super South looking. The pictures do not do them justice. We hang out for two days to let the worst of the weather go by and to regain our strength - shopping, doing laundry, me doing some legal work, fixing things on the boat, and generally re-grouping. We meet a lovely couple (Mike Wagner and Bev Fowers) who live on their Irwin 40 MK II and who offer to chauffeur us to the supermarket which is not in walking distance. An offer too good to refuse. It turns out that the marina is chock full of really friendly cruisers and we make a lot of friends.
Nov. 23 - There’s another really bad storm predicted to begin around midnight tonight with gale force winds, etc, but we have a reservation at a marina in Fernandina Beach Florida and it’s only a 40 plus mile trip on the outside, so we leave at 8:00 in light wind with predicted ocean conditions benign to finally get to Florida. Unfortunately it’s not to be. Before be get out of Brunswick Harbor we get a call from the marina in Fernandina where we have the reservation, basically telling us not to come, although not exactly in those words. They keep saying that the face dock where they would put us would be very exposed to the coming weather and to the large swells that it will generate, notwithstanding that it’s inside the harbor and in a creek. We look into other marinas in Fernandina Beach but they’re relatively small and none has adequate draft for us. We put our heads together and decide that if the marina that we have a reservation for tells us not to come that we’d be fools not to listen, so we return to Brunswick Landing Marina, pretty much resigned to the idea that we will spend Thanksgiving here. The system that’s coming in is supposed to last for a long time, and we are not anxious to try to negotiate the difficult section of ICW between here and Fernandina, or to hang out on the hook (be at anchor for the non-boaters) in 35 mile winds and 40 degree temperatures. One good thing is that I was introduced to a welder who looked at our bent bow pulpit right after it was damaged, but he said he could not get to it until after Thanksgiving. Now we’re thinking, we might as well let him fix it while we’re stuck here anyway. It’s $2/ft. per night here, but only $11/ft. per month, so it’s cheaper to stay as long as we need to as to do anything else now that we’ll be hear for at least another two nights. We’ll be talking to the welder on Monday and decide them. Everyone’s staying put with the predicted weather and from that perspective the company is very nice. That’s the end of this post. Next post will be "post storm, so to speak."
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