Savannah to Doboy Sound
29 January 2019 | Doboy Sound, GA
Capn Andy/Cold and Windy
The anchorage South of Savannah was Elba Island Cut. In the middle of the night on one of my anchor checks I found we had dragged. There are strong currents here and also ship traffic that sends a large wake to bounce the catamaran around. I reanchored and it held this time.
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In the morning when I got underway I was shocked to see my smart phone hadn’t charged overnight, it was down to 31 per cent power. I relied on it for back up navigation and left it on in the pilothouse where I could monitor our course. I also was having problems with the CF-C1 laptop that I use for navigation, for some reason its GPS dongle wouldn’t always start, in fact, it rarely started. I could look at charts but no GPS position.
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I moved the dongle to another USB port and it started up the second time I rebooted the laptop. I left it running all day. I plugged an extension cord into the inverter outlet and plugged the laptop’s charger into it. Fortunately it was a clear sunny day with lots of solar power.
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I hadn’t gone very far when a very nice ketch with traditional bowsprit passed us and then just a few minutes later came back going in the opposite direction. They didn’t call me on the radio. I verified I was on the correct waterway and then came to a swing bridge that I could easily fit under, mastless, but they must have had some problem. Later there was a Coast Guard all stations radio bulletin the the bridge was stuck in the down position.
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I continued navigating and found another phone charging cable and tried it and it worked. Soon the phone was all charged up.
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I stopped for fuel along the way and tied up with just one line on the port bow. We were once again heading into an adverse current and that current held us at the dock. We later got a boost for a while, but in the afternoon the ebb tide current bucked us as we headed up to a location known as Florida Passage. We are getting closer to St. Marys, we are in Georgia, and up ahead are some familiar islands, Jekyll and St. Simons. We ended up anchoring off the channel part way through Florida Passage and I changed the oil in the outboard which was interesting working from the dinghy.
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In the morning we got underway and headed down the Bear River. This feeds into St. Catherines Sound North of St. Catherines Island. This begins a string of barrier islands known as the Golden Isles. Once again we were bucking the flood tide all the way to the Sound.
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Across the Sound we headed up the Newport River and had a boost from the tide for a little bit. We branched off into Johnson Creek and were slowed to the 2 knot range by the current. I was hoping for some help at some point from the tides, but as it worked out, we fought the flood tide all the way to Sapelo Sound and once we crossed the Sound, high tide had occurred and then going into the Front River, you guessed it, the ebb tide hit us.
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The forecast was for a cold front to come through, bring rain, and very cold temperatures in the morning. The wind was on the nose of course. Midafternoon I did some planning about where we would be around 5:30 PM, just about a half hour before sundown. Knowing that the ebb was going to delay us even more when I got up to full strength, I guessed that we would make about 5 more miles. I looked ahead on the chart and put a marker at a good looking anchorage. I was looking for about 10 feet of water well off the channel.
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With about and hour or so left in the cruising day we got a boost from the current. This happens because the ICW links waterways together in many places. Thus, you can get ebb tide in one waterway and then an opposite ebb tide in the next waterway. We had gone from the Front River to the Crescent River and were going twice as fast as I had figured. I cleared the marker from the chart and chose another spot further down. We got there just before sundown and I idled the engine down and turned toward shore. When the depth got to 12 feet I dropped anchor and set it with the engine.
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The photo is a look back at Sapelo Sound as we entered the Front River.