Movin' On

We stayed in St. Augustine for a week. This is a great city if you like history, which we do. The city is the oldest continuous settlement in the U.S. While we were there a friend of mine from High School visited. I hadn't seen her in 39 years and we had a great visit. We had communicated through email for a couple of years so when we finally met again it was very relaxed.

We departed a half hour late because of fog. The first thing we had to do was go through the Bridge of Lions and we could hardly see it even though we were in a slip 100 feet away. The bridge only opens on the hour and half hour so we waited. The fog lifted enough by 7:30 for us to get out of the slip and go through. We continued north up the ICW to Fernandina Beach Florida. This will be the last stop in Florida. Just a couple of miles north is the Georgia border. We decided not to do the ICW in Georgia because we had heard that they had not dredged the ICW for at least three years and it has lots of shoaling areas. One boater told us when he came south he went aground twice and bumped bottom many times. And this was with a shallower draft then ours.

We stayed on a mooring just one night in Fernandina Beach because we had a good weather window to go out the St. Mary's inlet for an overnight sail to Port Royal Sound. We left the mooring around 11:15 AM and went over to the fuel dock to refuel for the trip. We left the fuel dock right at noon and headed out. The inlet channel is about 8 mile long so when you finally get out you can hardly see the low lying Amelia and Cumberland Islands that make up the south and north land masses of the inlet. On the way out we saw lots of dolphins and leaping rays. That's right, leaping rays. There were sting rays leaping out of the water. That was a first for us. I had said to Sandy, "Now ya don't see that sitting at home in your living room".

The wind and seas were pretty calm when we finally got out and made our turn northeast. Wind was about 8-10 knots from the southeast and seas around 1 foot. A very comfortable ride. We were moving about 5-5.5 knots. We had planned for an arrival at the Port Royal Sound outer buoy around 7:30-8:00 the next morning. I wanted to enter during daylight. Sometimes they move the entrance buoys from what is on the chart depending on where the current shoaling is.

As the night progressed the wind was forcast to turn to the southwest and freshen to 10-15 knots. The forcasters were right on with this one. Around 8 PM the wind slowed some and by midnight had clocked around to southwest and picked up speed. Unfortunately so did the seas. The waves became 2-3 feet.

During the night we had heard several distress calls to the coast guard. One was a fire onboard a boat. The boat was in one of the sounds and they were able to get the fire out while another boater came to their aide. Another was an overturned boat about 100 mile southeast of Charleston. When you hear those you thank god it isn't yourself that is having an emergency.

We had to cross the entry channel to Tybee Roads which goes into the Savannah River. It was still dark but I could see several objects on radar right in our course path. There was no moon and it was really dark. I first picked up the objects on radar about 16 miles away. As we approached we could make out that they were anchored ships waiting to go into that channel. We slowed down some since it was getting close to 6 AM when there is a little daylight. Once we could clearly see a path through the anchored ships we continued.

We arrived at the Port Royal Sound buoy at 7:55 AM with winds around 20 knots and seas 2-4 feet. With lots of 4's. The current and wind was pushing us east and when entering the channel we had to have a 20 degree crab to the west of course to stay between the buoys. From the outer buoy it is about 28 miles to reach Beaufort S. C. We arrived right at noon and tied up at the Downtown Marina. It was exactly 24 hours and we were tired. We were not able to get much sleep with the seas so lumpy. 2-4 foot waves are not bad except the period between the waves was very short and the direction was confused, meaning they came from several different directions.

We are going to visit here for a couple of days and then head up the ICW to Charleston.

Well, it's Saturday night and you know what they say about sailors. A sailor likes his rum like a diesel likes its oil.