Tuesday morning, Sherry and Alan had to head home, so we were on our own for adventures today. I had a scenic drive in mind, but Sherry had mentioned that Tallulah Falls State Park and Gorge was nice, so I checked that out. It looked like a fun place to see, so I figured we could go there first, then maybe continue our drive. It was pretty chilly and breezy, but clear and beautiful. Being a Pacific Northwest girl, and now Florida girl, I can’t get over how little underbrush there is here in the Georgia forests. I’ve lived in three places in my life: Florida, Western Washington, and Alaska. (Alaska was 40 years ago.). The two most recent places have nearly impenetrable undergrowth!
Sunday we helped (a little) with packing up the race paddock. I always associated the word ‘paddock’ with horses, but it is the same for race cars…. where they hang out when they aren’t racing. It was a rainy cold morning, and we really were not a lot of help. Around 3:30, we pulled out and headed to Don Carter State Park, which is on Lake Lanier. It was only about a 40 minute drive from the track, which was really nice. We had reservations there for three nights, and for Sunday & Monday, our good friends Sherry & Alan from our 2018 Great Loop adventure were going to camp there as well! They live just east of Atlanta, so they asked if they could join us for a couple of days. YAY!
“The Chattahoochee River, flowing from the north Georgia Mountains, meets Lake Lanier at Don Carter State Park, creating a unique opportunity for recreation and outdoor appreciation on the northern edge of metro-Atlanta.”
Wednesday through Sunday, we spent our days at the Racetrack with Scotty B White and his racing friends. I’ve known Scotty since elementary school, and when he invited us to come be part of his crew again in Atlanta, we gladly accepted! We’ve turned into his “Hospitality and Go-fer” crew. 😄 We fix lunch, keep snacks and hydration available, and run for gas and parts. 😊. And we get to watch some fun racing and be on the ‘inside’. On Wednesday, we drove from Adel up to Braselton, which is just to the northeast of Atlanta. Along the way, I was amazed at what looks like wild wisteria, with it’s purple pendulum bunches of flowers. It was everywhere! It’s very pretty, but I imagine it’s like ivy and end up choking out the host plants and trees.
Tuesday: We’ve REALLY been living life in pencil – again! I’ve made several road trip plans, and we’re currently on only a piece of one of the plans, and we truly have no idea where we will be one week from today. 🤷♀️. This is me using my pencil and eraser about equal time on our calendar, pretty much like chopsticks.
Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Weather: Temp: 85/52, Humidity: 76/20%, Top Wind: S10 mph, Precip: None, Miles Traveled: none
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Our only plan for today was to take an Uber ride into Savannah, and stroll around enjoying whatever we came across. Here is a map of where we are. We came up the Intracoastal Waterway, and will continue on it tomorrow. It does not go along the Savannah River, and we know from visiting the riverfront there, we would not want to dock Island Girl along the wharf in Savannah. There is a lot of commercial traffic on the river, and it is a rough water kind of location to be docked! It’s made for ships and ferries and big boats.
We had to wait awhile to get an Uber…. we kept getting the message that no cars were available. Finally just after noon, a fare showed up with an UberX for around $11. We grabbed it, and our driver picked us up at the entrance to the marina. We were dropped off at the Riverfront, which is one of our favorite places to wander. I am absolutely fascinated with the old old stone streets, wharf walls, and buildings.
Every time we’re here, I just get swept back to imagining pirates, scoundrels and wenches bargaining in the streets for all kinds of things.
We wandered along the entire length of River Street, poking our noses into a few places. We did purchase some turtles at one of the sweet shops. Dang they’re spendy!
All of the establishments have signs to wear masks. One place had a funny sign…I don’t know if occupancy is limited right now or not, but the sign said something like – Current regulations limit occupancy to 30%, so only people who can consume 3 drinks are allowed. Clever! 🍺🍺🍺. But sticking with our usual brewery theme, we went to Moon River Brewing Company. We’ve been here before, but thought we’d see what was on tap.
Kenny ordered a Barrel-aged Imperial Amber Stout called Cellar Dweller. It tasted like a dark stout or porter, but the color was so light it kind of messed with your head. Like, imagine drinking a Coke that was orange in color. Would it taste like Coke? 🤔. Or would your sense of sight mess with your sense of taste? It happens! Anyway, the beer was pretty tasty!
Then we figured we better find some food, since we hadn’t eaten anything yet today. There was a BBQ joint not too far away, so we went to test it out. Savannah Smokehouse BBQ & Brew.
We ordered some ribs and pulled pork. It was good, but we both agreed that the joint in Cocoa Village Florida set the bar really high at the beginning of our trip! That place was AH-MAY-ZING!
After lunch, we roamed around and found the City Market. It was a cute little place with some shops.
Also here was the American Prohibition Museum. This would probably have been quite interesting to visit, but we didn’t go in.
I saw this on the outside of the building. Apparently the first prohibition in America was before we were even a country! It was issued by King George II in 1735, decreed in Savannah: “Whereas it is found by Experience that the use of Liquors called Rum and Brandy, in the Province of Georgia are more particularly hurtful and pernicious to Man’s Body and have been attended with dangerous Maladies and fatal distempers…No Rum or Brandy nor any other kind of Spirits or Strong Waters by whatsoever name they are or may be distinguished…shall be imported or brought to shore.”. Geeze George, what a buzz-kill, and he was clear across the Atlantic ocean from here!
This is another signature feature of Savannah – a park in the middle of an intersection. I really like the charm of this city, and I’ve written about a lot of it in our previous visits. It was fun to recognize some of the places that we saw when we did a Segway tour here a few years ago.
We went back down to the waterfront and saw not just the same cruise ship (American Star) that we were docked with in Fernandina, but her sister ship Independence were both docked along the waterfront. No wonder the waterfront was busy with a lot of people! And then we saw the quintessential paddle-wheeler going up the river…. without using its paddle wheel.
I was looking for one of those cool pirate lair kind of bars to duck into, but I think we turned the wrong way. So we ended up at Joe’s.
We have a son named Joe, so why not. We wanted to have a drink outside by the waterfront, so we were told to order to-go drinks, then just go sit at any table. Yep, that’s a thing here! Mine was a fancy fruity rum drink and it was so pretty and yummy!
I tried to get a selfie of us with the river in the background, but we were in the shade, so everything behind us whited-out. And then my cute date was being a goofball and wouldn’t look at the camera.
It was a super comfy day in Savannah – which hasn’t ever happened when we’ve been here before. The humidity was really low in the 20% range. It didn’t know that was even possible for here! After about five hours in town, we rallied up another Uber to take us back to the marina, and we just chilled out for the rest of the evening. We didn’t do anything super exciting or new while here, but we always enjoy the town. Tomorrow we’re headed to Hilton Head. I’ve only been there once by land, and Kenny has never been there, so it will be a fun couple of days of new adventures.
Monday, April 5, 2021. Weather: Temp: 80/50, Humidity: 79/21%, Top Wind: S10 mph, Precip: None, Miles Traveled: 38
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Yes, there really is a place in Georgia called Thunderbolt! This was going to be a pretty easy day. There used to be a shallow spot called HellGate that would dictate our timing with the tides, but I checked several sources and found that it has been dredged and is not currently a problem spot. YAY! As a matter of fact, we went through it at low tide, and did just fine. 👍
The humidity was surprisingly low this morning, and there was no dew to clear off the windows. The water was nice and flat with the tiniest breeze, so it wasn’t too chilly! We even stayed warm enough with our extra blankets last night, and had a nice peaceful stay, just floating in the middle of the creek all by ourselves. Thankfully! I thought this as called Wahlburg Creek. But when I looked on the Google to send a screenshot to our kids, it said Blackbeard Creek! 😳. Yikes! We should have been on the lookout for pirates! Argh me maties!
This was at the north end of the creek as we were heading out. Just around the point to the left of this picture was the St Catherine’s inlet to the Atlantic Ocean. This looked like a really nice beach, so if a person wanted to hang out here, this would have been a neat place to explore. But, we always just anchor for the night, then keep moving.
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!
Saturday, April 3, 2021. Weather: Temp: 60/40, Humidity: 88/33%, Top Wind: NE13 mph, Precip: None, Miles Traveled: 42
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Can you even believe all the salt that we have everywhere from all of the wind and waves that last few days? When I walk up the side of the boat and my legs brush against the side, my pants turn white with salt. Just add tequila and lime, I guess!! 🥴. This barely even starts to show how everything is coated in white.
Wednesday: Today’s adventure took us through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We’ve never been here before, so I determined our itinerary to get home from Kentucky by going through the park. I hopped out and walked down the street to Starbucks for coffee to go. I was sure there would be a line outside at 8:00 in the morning. But NO! There was ONE person that went in before me. That was it!! I thought it would be busy, because I figured most hotels were like ours, and no longer serving breakfast because of Covid. Huh! Maybe everyone went to the sit-down pancake joints?
We talked for about 30 seconds about taking the scenic Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail. That’s the one-way scenic drive that would drop us back at the beginning of town in Gatlinburg. We decided not to take the time, since reports that I read were that the park is busiest between 10-6. So let’s get there before the hoards. We passed this sign at 8:50. The Visitor’s Center wasn’t open yet (9:00), so I grabbed a map, and away we went.
Saturday: miles traveled 470. Elevation tonight 640’ in Greensboro, Georgia.
Today was a long day on the road, from Memphis Tennessee to east of Atlanta Georgia. I originally had our itinerary taking us from Memphis to New Orleans. But somewhere along the way, Kenny suggested that we look at the mileage, and if our friends Sherry & Alan were home that maybe we go east before going south. These are our fun Bayliner friends from doing the Great Loop last year. I checked with Sherry, and she said they would just be getting home from a trip to New England on Saturday 9/28, so if we came after 6:00pm, they’d be home… and YES!, please come visit! So I happily adjusted our itinerary, and that is what we did!
