Sunday, April 4, 2021.
Weather: Temp: 68/43, Humidity: 93/32%, Top Wind: 12E mph, Precip: None but Fog 🌫, Miles Traveled: 60
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Once again, we were timing our departure based upon a shallow area that we needed to transit today, called Little Mud River. It was about 3 hours from here, and high tide was to be at 3:15. We figured if we were there at 12:30, we’d still have over four feet of tide in our favor, and tide rising, so we planned to leave the dock at 10:00. And as it turned out, that was a good thing! I got up at about 8:00 and tuned in to our church’s online worship for Easter. The boat in front of us had started their engines about the time that I got up, left them running for awhile, then shut em down. I wondered why, and then looked outside. OH! We have fog! I spaced and didn’t take a picture until it started clearing up. At one point, I couldn’t see that bridge, and I couldn’t see the marina buildings on shore.
This was looking out the channel…
About an hour and a half later, it was clear and the water was splat flat. YAY!!! Just in time for us to boogie out.
This was our scenery for awhile. Not terribly exciting here in Georgia!
Every once in awhile, we’d find a mound of dirt where some trees were lucky enough to take root.
Then more flat water. This is looking out over Sapelo Sound. It was a really big body of water. Once again, we felt like we were headed out to sea, but we got to turn north before we felt any real effects of the ocean.
Our destination today was someplace to drop an anchor. There are only a couple of marinas anywhere in this part of Georgia, and with it being Easter Sunday, and the weather so calm FINALLY, we figured we might as well just find an anchorage. We haven’t used our anchor since we gave the boat it’s pinocchio-ectomy (we removed the long bow sprit). I scoped a few spots out, and picked one. Georgia has new strict anchoring rules, and the hardest ones to deal with are avoiding the shellfish zones. I found a place that appears to be out of the zone, with good reviews. It even had land to the east for a bit of shelter. A lot of the anchorages are just in creeks out among the tall grass.
We found our way into Wahlburg Creek from the southern entrance. It was good to have more than one chart plotter for guidance. Garmin showed that the entrance only had four feet of water. I had read reviews that said navigating in using Navionics showed plenty of water. We were here at nearly high tide, and never saw less than 20’ depth coming in! We followed the white trail (we want to avoid blue on Navionics) in from the left, and here we are – the red arrow at the yellow anchor spot on the right. Woo-hoo!
We tootled around for awhile to find a place SHALLOW enough to drop the anchor! I thought the bend in the creek would be nice, since the breeze was coming from the southeast. But the depth there was 40’ and way too deep. So we moved north a bit and found 20’. That was still pretty deep, the tide was nearly high now, and would drop 6-7’ tonight. We knew the weather was supposed to be very calm, so putting out 100’ of chain with the bridle so that the scope would be from the water surface would give us a 4:1, and then 5:1 at low tide. That’s not as much as we like, because we’re always over cautious when anchoring, but we agreed to go for it. So we got the anchor down, and it set right away. Pretty sure the bottom is mud, and I’ll have a whole anchor full of it when we pull it up in the morning. Here is our scene out the port side of the boat.
…And out the starboard side looking west. The current was running at least one knot as we sat here, so we stayed straight in the creek, and it looked like we were idling under way behind us.
Here’s our anchor set up. We put out 100’ of chain, and hooked on the Mantus Bridle, so any pulling is on the bridle rather than pulling on the chain. We hooked up Slinky the weiner-dog (expandable) hose for in the morning. It’s a good thing we checked it out, since we haven’t used it for three years. It is connected to a raw water spigot (meaning it sucks up whatever water we’re floating in) and pumps it through the hose. So….. it didn’t work. Hmmmm. 🤔. The power switch was on, the thru-hull open, but no pumping sound and no water. Mechanic then remembered that last summer, we had all of the cabinets out and all of the wiring, sockets and switches were un-done. He checked the switch, and lo & behold, it wasn’t hooked up right. So he fixed it, and ta-da! The weiner-dog hose was working! I’m glad, because the chain and anchor are likely to be plastered with mud in the morning.
We had a beautiful sunset, there was a tiny breeze, and there was not a cloud in the sky.
Here is my chef, grilling a T-bone for dinner. Yum, it was so good!
We enjoyed the peaceful evening watching the sun set.
We both agreed that once the anchor is set and we know we aren’t moving, we really do enjoy being anchored out every once in awhile. We really didn’t have any bugs, we put on some music, enjoyed dinner, listened to and watched all kinds of birds – what a nice evening!
Here are the tidal currents for today where we are.
And here is our track for the day. A lot of squiggling!
We think that we have the rest of the week figured out, and we are going to all new-to-us marinas, which will be fun and interesting. Our low tonight will be 49 degrees. We won’t run our heaters while we’re sitting here with batteries as power, so I think we might have to get out some extra blankies!