Blog Post 13:
5/10/2018
Mary and I made good use of our time exploring Savannah and working on various projects. We rented a nice Airbnb cottage near Forsyth Park, went to the farmers market, cooked some yummy meals, explored the city's parks and squares, ate pizza at Vinny Van Gogo's, got a haircut, and enjoyed a fantastic self guided pub crawl. Savannah is a great town, full of history and kind people. We had an opportunity to spend some time with our old friends from Costa Rica, Chuck and Mercedes Chastain and their kids. They were in town visiting family, and it was great to spend some quality time with them.

Underway Day 13:
As far as the Mombo, things went better than expected. The Suzuki mechanic Phil Dolan was great to work with and fair on pricing. He was able to get the exact engine we needed in record time. We also installed 2 new Suzuki engine gauges, which are amazing and modernize the engine diagnostics. We splashed the boat Wednesday, fueled up, and were underway on Thursday morning. The first few hours, I was breaking in the engine gently. The spring weather was beautiful and we took a detour to explore the Savannah riverfront and check out America's 4th busiest port.
I especially liked the old tunnel that leads to the Pirate House from the river. In was used to smuggle booze underground from the river to the pirate house during both the colonial period and prohibition. Under the British, they Shanghai'd and "impressed into service" over 1000 unlucky sailors at this spot. Basically one minute you were drinking in a pub, and then after being either "over served" or drugged, you would wake up on a ship at sea. You are now part of the Royal Navy! If you didn't like it, you were flogged until your morale improved.
As we worked our way North to Charleston, I was able to throttle up, and we were once again weaving through beautiful marsh lowlands at low planing speed of 25 knots. It's really fun to cruise through some of the narrow cuts, navigating on the fly. We saw too many dolphins to count. The wetlands in N Georgia and S Carolina are extremely healthy and teeming with birds and sea life. We stopped for lunch at Dufusky Island, where Mary worked for 2 summers while we were building the house in CR. After lunch, we had smooth running all the way to Charleston. The boat just felt great, like a barking dog about to pull a sled, she just wanted to run.
It was a long day, but we powered through rather than getting an anchorage and arrived in Charleston to a beautiful sunset. Then we found out our friends The Nth Power had a show that night at the Charleston Pour House. We met up with Ben Fagan, my 1st mate from the Gulf Stream crossing, and his girlfriend Laura. We had a lovely sushi dinner. Then we enjoyed a wonderful night of music, and had fun surprising our friends in the band. After a family style hang post-show we went back to the boat, a bit too late at 0200. The teepee tent was up in minutes and we fell fast asleep.