From the Captain



Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind.   Hoagy Carmichael

Tell me what I say.     Ray Charles

1/14/13. Charleston to Beaufort, SC, 58 nm.

Setting sail, Vermont style

We're traveling. There was frost on the dock this morning. But the sun was out, the wind had decreased. The marina experiences swift cross-currents in the Stono River. Slack water (at the transition between high and low tides) was at 6:30 this morning. We were up early, showered to warm up, and left the slip by 7am, heading upstream against an ebb tide.

Amazingly, the current changed a few miles upriver, and we had favorable currents for hours, making over 7 kts. The day warmed, the sky was clear, and we were booking it. We feel we're done with sightseeing for awhile until we get to some warmer weather. Perhaps at the Georgia barrier islands.

Meanwhile, the segment along the ICW was beautiful. Here there are many small rivers, all with Indian names. Wappoo Creek, Ashepoo and Coosaw Rivers. Tomorrow, next to Hilton Head, we will pass Daufuskie Island. This is not an Indian name. The island was named by the first settlers, descendants of early African slaves. This was the first key they came to.

The rivers are connected by short canals in a stair like manner. The canals are the treads, the rivers the risers. The Carolina low country is beautiful. Remote, uninhabited, little islands and creeks. We wind our way through a hidden world of water. Gradually, we make our way west and southward to Beaufort. Originally, we  thought it would take 2 days to get here.

Beaufort (pronounced "BYOUfort", as opposed to Beaufort, NC, pronounced, "BOEfort") is another one of those waterfront towns with old houses and charm. There is a lot to see here, and plenty of space to anchor in the harbor. You can tie your dingy up at the local marina and for a small price, use their showers and bathrooms. There are museums and shops to visit.

We didn't do any of that. We're heading south. We anchored behind an island in the river a mile or so downstream. Far away from the travelers anchored in the crowded harbor, we had the place to ourselves.

I did have the unplanned opportunity to have another swim, however. We anchored and drifted over a crab trap buoy. We didn't see it come back up and were worried it was a fouled on the rudder or, worse, the propeller. Before starting the engine to move to another spot further away, I donned swimming trunks, tied a safety line and  float to the back of the boat, and went down the ladder into the brackish water. No sign of the crab trap. As soon as I was back onboard, and it wasn't very long given the cold air and cold water, the buoy popped into sight. It must have been on the keel. We moved and had a peaceful night, coming up on the full moon.

11/15/13

Beaufort, S.C. to Herb River, Thunderbolt, GA  40 nm

Each segment of the ICW has unique characteristics, it seems, and to sum up the part we entered in lower South Carolina and Georgia, the word would be, "winding" As opposed to the rather straight canals and rivers of the Carolinas, the waterway here winds around islands, up and down small estuaries, across sounds and larger rivers, doubling back on itself at times. Look over a low grassy island, and you can see the mast of the sailboat that was in front of you going the other way as he rounds the unseen bend before you.

Occasionally there are houses along the waterway, but often just marshland. There are some densely settled areas, such as Hilton Head. Mostly, we see few other boats. The coast guard runabout buzzes by now and then, the men stopping to service navigational buoys along the way. A cruiser passes slowly to port. He hails us on the radio to tell us they have a summer place in Pittsford, Vermont, and know Lake Champlain well. Toward the end of the day, the cruisers all having passed us, we pick up a few straggling sailboats like ourselves. There is a cute green outboard powered motor sailer, the Juliette K, and another sailboat hailing from Conway, New Hampshire, the Abner E. Abner and Luna get to the swing bridge near Thunderbolt at the same time and pass through on the same opening. The operator says on VHF channel 9, "You two bunch up together and I'll open the bridge for you."

One thing about the narrow twisting channel is that silt tends to be deposited on the inside of the turns. The channel is apt to shift, and the shoals may be unmarked. The commander stays current with Active Captain on her Ipad. There is an exclamation point on the electronic chart at each spot where trouble is reported, and there are reports from people who have passed there. Nonetheless, she did have the opportunity to find out what a negative reading on the depth finder means. Luckily she had slowed down when the readings started dropping. She was just a little too close to the inside of the curve. Luna was stuck in the soft muddy bottom. But the commander was able to reverse the engine, move off the shoal and get going again. Had we been truly stuck, we could have waited it out. Tides here rise and fall about 9 feet in all. The rising tide would have lifted us off in short order.

We are making good time with favorable currents and fairly flat water. We have stowed the dinghy on the foredeck which adds about a knot to our speed. We could go on.  But the sky is threatening  rain, and we stop about 2:30 at a quiet anchorage off the waterway. We get ready for the rain, which comes after a while.

No nice sunset photos tonight. But we did get an opportunity to survey Luna's cabin leaks. The leaks onto the icebox and the quarter berth--at both ends of the mainsheet traveller, have stopped. The window leaks are much better after I applied some sealer but there are spots that still need attention. We don't need to put plastic over the desk and dinette seats any more. Definitely improved!

It's cool and damp, but it is not cold. The air is changing for the better. Time for happy hour, dinner, and looking where we might get to in the next few days. The Georgia barrier islands are just ahead of us.

11/16/13 Thunderbolt, GA to Crescent River (Creighton Island), GA 52.2 nm

fog at high tide--only the top of the marker is visable

We woke up early, prepared to leave on the high tide, and found what we had not encountered yet on this trip: fog. Considering the options, delay leaving and go through some of the shoal areas at low tide or depart into the fog, we chose the latter. There is very little traffic on this part of the ICW, and no commercial traffic, so we felt fairly confident we'd be in no danger of collision.

Nor would we lose our way. The GPS is invaluable here. The magenta line is on the nautical chart on the screen, and instead of navigating by sight from buoy to buoy, we just kept the icon for the boat on the magenta line on the GPS screen. Out of the fog, a red day marker emerged. I found this on the GPS screen, touched the screen to select it and told the Garmin to navigate to the buoy. It told me the distance: .25nm. So visibility was about a quarter mile. Plenty of time to avoid an oncoming boat should one appear. Which it didn't.

We were fairly confident in our ability to navigate safely. We were also relieved when the sun broke through and the fog lifted. It turned out to be a lovely, sunny, and fairly warm day.

The day was another one of travel through desolate country, winding streams, and estuaries. Narrow channels and shoals on the curves. Not without some drama. We overheard a radio conversation. Excalibur has gone aground and called the tow boat. There is a give and take between them. In the meantime a motor cruiser comes on the scene and offers to throw up a large wake to "bounce you off the ground." We lose contact from there, but soon a tow boat passes us to port. Apparently the large wake was ineffective. Before long, we see Excalibur up ahead. He has taken a turn too sharply, but the tow boat has pulled him off. We radioed the towboat to ask of it is safe for us to pass, keeping wide of the grounded vessel. He assures us we are in the right channel. We get by in water that is plenty deep.

Off the shoal, Excalibur pulls in behind us as we cross the sound. Looking at the chart, the commander finds enough depth to cut off a red buoy, making one side of a triangle whose other two sides are the magenta line. She saves some distance. But Excalibur stays left, following the magenta line exactly. After his experience with the tow boat, who can blame him.

Below Savannah, we cross the Moon River. Here I regret to report that the geographical certainty most widely held among the baby boom generation is false. Moon River is not wider than a mile. At its mouth it is 0.7 miles across, and there is a small island in the way at low tide. I am crushed. I ask the commander how wide Moon River is. "Where is that?" she asks.

I have read that the county named the Moon River in deference to Johnny Mercer, who lived near Savannah, after he wrote the song in 1961. Before, it was the Back River.

We're at the top of the barrier islands off Creighton Island. We've had another fairly easy, long travel day, and we have the anchorage in the wide, quiet stream to ourselves.

11/17/13 Creighton Island, GA to Cumberland Island, GA, Terrapin Cove 48.5nm.

This is our fourth consecutive day without an interface with civilization. We like the independence and solitude. But supplies can start to run low. You can run out of fuel, run out of water, run out of wind, run out of all kinds of things. We have run out of chocolate. Our supply of miniature Snickers is gone. Both of us thought we had another bag when we left Charleston. Is this enough to drive us into the next town? This is Georgia. There are no next towns or very few. Brunswick looms in the distance, but it is several miles up river. Not worth the detour. The commander makes a batch of brownies that will have to hold us until St. Marys. It's hard to conserve.

You can also run out of water under the keel. The guidebook explains that Georgia and South Carolina have very little money for dredging to keep the waterways open. I'm not sure who is responsible for this--the states or the Army Corps of Engineers, or maybe it's a shared responsibility. But Georgia, in particular, with all its curves and twists, seems to have a problem with shoaling.

We reach the canal north of Jekyll Island just at low tide. A shrimp boat hurries out, booms and dredges pulled in tightly, passing us to port. Halfway up the canal, a sailboat is stuck in the mud. Our depth finder is reading a foot or less under the keel. We creep by. We are within shouting distance of him. He draws five and a half feet, a foot more than Luna's shoal draft keel. A little right, a little left, the depth finder is reading in the tenths and zero at one point. We do not go aground, but it takes nearly an hour to traverse the 1 mile canal, and we're tense the whole way. At the helm, I'm afraid to look at the depth finder, but know I must. We finally reach the Jekyll Island bridge and deeper water.

There's a marina after the bridge ($2.00 per boat foot per night), and lots of boats anchored off the waterway beyond. There's a public boat ramp and a dinghy dock so you can motor over, tie up and walk into the town. It looks like a nice place to stay, but we're so put off by the shallow canal, we just want to move on. We go another hour to Cumberland Island where we will spend a few days exploring.

A flashing green buoy points the way at Cumberland Island

The first anchorage on Cumberland Island from the north is Terrapin Cove, and it's lovely. It's too open and exposed to stay in rough conditions, but no winds is expected overnight. There may be rain coming. The place is beautiful. a narrow beach to the east, an expansive view to the west. Lots of open water in between. We're the only boat we can see. "Like Lake Champlain on steroids," the commander notes.

The rain does not reach us, but the clouds to the west produce a magnificent sunset that seems to take hours to trail off finally to darkness. We look forward to walking the beach in the morning.

11/8/13 Terrapin Cove to Brickhill River. Cumberland Island, GA 4 nm.

The fog is back. Eldridge's book on tides, that great source of nautical tidbits, notes that fog happens when moist air cools. Cooler air holds less moisture, so what is there condenses out into fog. This is common in the north Atlantic where moist air over the ocean meets cooler air in the atmosphere. Fog dissipates once the air has warmed.

In this case, there is fog because the humidity is so high. Last night we saw a rainbow around the nearly full moon, a sign, according to Eldridge, of rain coming. In any case, we can't see very far. We hear a boat engine in the distance. I get out our fog horn, a human lung-powered affair that makes an amazingly loud noise. One short blast, one long, one short to signify a boat at anchor. The boat passes by unseen.

Eventually, the fog clears. The narrow beach is gone, and we are looking at trees. We are a thousand feet away from where we dropped the anchor. For the first time on this journey, the anchor dragged overnight in the changing current. No harm is done. Eventually it reset itself and is holding fast. There are no shallows nearby and no other boats with which to collide. But the potential for harm is there.

There was no wind overnight, and the seas were calm. The bottom is muddy and there is good anchor holding reported. However, the currents are strong here and reverse with the tide. Often I noticed Luna riding perpendicular to the anchor line. I imagine the lateral stress on the anchor caused it to drag. To prevent this in the future, we can put out two anchors, one upstream and one downstream. Or we can put out more anchor rode. We arrived near low tide, but with an eight foot tide, I should have put out fifty feet more of line to maintain the recommended 7:1 ratio of anchor rode to depth.

Since we're so far from the beach, we give up on the idea of a walk and move on to the next anchorage. This is on the Brickhill River near a remote campground on the island. There are reports that you can land your dinghy, pick up a hiking trail and walk two and a half miles to the beach.

There is another cold front coming with strong northeast winds and small craft warnings off shore for the next couple days. The anchorage is well-protected from the northeast. We never could find a place to land the dinghy, however. At all but high tide, steep muddy banks and marshes separated water from land.

There is some boat work to do. I opened the engine compartment to tighten the generator belt that was squeaking and found the front of the engine coated with salt. Water is dripping out of the sea water cooling pump that Phil and I had repaired the day before we left Vermont. Anticipating trouble, we had spent an extra day at the marina in Cape May so they could order us a replacement. It was time to put it on.

I have been thinking about this ever since Vermont. The mechanic in Cape May advised not replacing the old pump as long as it seemed to be working. However, it would be easier to do the work at a marina with all available tools than off at a remote anchorage somewhere. So, I've been a little uneasy, expecting the inevitable failure.

WD 40 is a wonderful thing. I am able to remove the fittings and pulley from the old pump and put them on the new pump without too much fussing. The new one is installed and working just fine. Water is spitting normally from the exhaust.

Life is good. But a question nags at me. Owning a boat, especially an older boat, is a continual process. You make improvements, you anticipate problems, and you fix things as they go wrong. So far so good. I like diagnosing problems and tinkering. I like the challenge of devising unconventional ways to do things, like getting a pulley off the water pump spindle without the special tool designed for this purpose. But I wonder at what point and under what circumstances a problem may arise that I am not able to fix.

11/19/13 Brickhill River to Plum Orchard, Cumberland Island, GA 4 nm.

Finally, a day to sightsee on Cumberland Island. We motored a short distance down river to a National Park Service dock at Plum Island, site of a Carnegie family mansion. We anchored in the river and dinghied ashore.

Andrew's brother, Thomas, purchased much of Cumberland Island and built a mansion, Dungeness. This was on the site of the original Dungeness, built by Nathaniel Greene, a Revolutionary War hero, in 1783. Apparently he purchased the island and harvested the live oak trees for ship building. The USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) was built with Cumberland Island oak.

The original Carnegie mansion burned in 1959, and the ruins are still visible on the other side of the island. Plum Orchard is one of the homes Thomas' wife, Lucy, built for her children. Like the park itself, the house was donated to and preserved by the National Park Service.

The house was open, and we peeked inside. There were a score of volunteers putting up Christmas decorations. Bruce, a park service volunteer from Minnesota with a winter home in Georgia, was available to give us a tour.

Guided tour of the "Gun Room" at Plum Orchard

To call this a house is an understatement, of course. We're thinking Downton Abbey. At one time, 50 servants were employed in this 21,700 square foot mansion. There are high ceilings, an indoor pool, and the house is divided so that servants could go about their jobs unseen by the house's other residents. There is a board in the kitchen to inform the servants the location of someone in the main house calling them. There is a bell at the grand staircase that was rung when it was time to dress for dinner. There is a squash court near the pool and a tennis court out back.

Down the path to the beach from Plum Orchard

Lest we start to consider that our need for living space might start to outstrip what Luna has to offer, we took a walk on the carriage road and path to the beach. Bruce said if we anchored lower down on the island by the ferry dock, the walk to the beach is only a quarter mile. The path from Plum Orchard is 2.5 miles long. Considering that it has been 6 days since we have been off the boat, we had been looking forward to a real walk for days.

The seashore is deserted. The north wind is blowing sand down the beach, so we sit in the shelter of a dune to admire the view before returning. There are signs here and there of the island's population of feral horses, but we see none until we return to the house, where three are calmly grazing on the lawn. We walk past swampland, expecting to see alligators. We did see an armadillo.

Small craft warnings off the beach at Cumberland Island

Our plan was to spend the night and motor to the ranger station at the south end of the island tomorrow. But the wind has come up, and as elsewhere, the interaction of the tide, current and wind has Luna in a compromised position too near the shore and sideways to the current. We were able to back her up, take up the anchor line, and set a second anchor to hold her toward the middle of the channel. We decided that given the forecast for continued high winds, we should leave and sail directly to St. Marys, on the Georgia mainland.

Stuff doesn't seem to happen when seas are calm, and there is no sense of danger or urgency. It doesn't happen during the 90 percent or so of the time we could call boring. We're idly floating along. Mindful of the buoys, of the course on the chart, chatting with each other, tuning in to how Luna feels. Watching the sky. Feeling the breeze. Trying to discern that magic point where water turns to marsh grass turns to sky. Listening to Luna's bubbling exhaust, which seems now to be going in perfect 6/8 time. Echoes of Gilbert and Sullivan play in my head:

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,

I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,

About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;

I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:

In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,

I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

Which I fancy myself to be. No, this is not when stuff happens. On the other hand, you're at the conning tower of the sub under your command, You raise the periscope to have a look around. There are enemy sub chasers everywhere you look. You slap up the handles on the periscope. It slides down. DIVE! DIVE! AOOGAH! AOOGAH! Down you go, but the enemy has seen you. Depth charges drift downward and explode around you. The ship rocks violently. Men are running everywhere. This is when stuff happens.

Twisting in the strong current and wind, anxious to get to a more sheltered place, we hoist the anchors, and as the commander powers up to leave, the transmission locks up and the engine stalls. We can go backward, but not forward. We reset the anchors  and called our friends at TowBoatUS. Thanks to the towing insurance we bought, the $900 towing bill, inflated by the strong windy conditions and growing darkness, cost us nothing. The boat brought us to Amelia Island Yacht Basin in Fernandino Beach, Florida, where they will check the problem in the morning. Meanwhile, we're tucked in, made fast securely to the dock, and here in Florida.

Luna's wake carves an interesting pattern on a cloudy morning