Middle of Nowhere

Cumberland Isle to Buckhead Creek off Ossabaw Island, GA

Days on Cruise: 10

Statute Miles Today:  69

Travel Time:  7 hours 52 minutes

Total Odometer:  376 miles

We started the day with no particular destination in mind, thinking we would go until we felt we were done for the day.  This stretch of the Georgia ICW is as remote at it gets.  A sea of grass.  So we ended up continuing until 4:30, thus making it our longest cruising day to date. But we had a great day  seeing the sights.

All day we traveled a serpentine route through marsh and grasslands, with trees 5-10 miles in the distance, broken occasionally by a large Sound to cross with an inlet from the ocean.  We saw almost no other boats, only a handful of cottages, and no towns or cities.

The exception to the “almost no other boats” was a small, 100-passenger cruise ship “Independence” who wound her way up the ICW ahead of us for much of the afternoon.

We did, however, see lots of pelicans, dolphins and seagulls. In fact, at one point it felt almost like Hitchcock’s movie The Birds as we were followed closely by 50-100 seagulls for many, many miles, just off our stern and occasionally beside and in front of us, cawing loudly and continuously.

The most “interesting” part of the day was when we traveled the aptly named Little Mud River. The cruising guides suggest traveling it at high tide because it’s badly shoaled and becomes very shallow. Tides move about 9 feet from high to low here. Our timing was off, and after studying the nautical charts closely, and knowing we have only a 3’ 7” draft (how deep our boat goes below the water) we decided to go for it even though it would put us there only an hour after low tide. As the depth gauge continued to drop from 10 to 7 to 4 feet beneath our hull, we throttled back to idle speed and proceeded cautiously, agreeing that if the water got “too skinny”, we’d drop the anchor and wait for the water to come up. Finally, at 1.9 feet under the hull, we were just about to decide we didn’t want to proceed further when it began moving slowly to greater depths.  Whew! Big sigh of relief.  Boaters with greater draft than ours will definitely want to do this 5-mile stretch at something other then low tide!  “Independence” was not on this segment; they must have gone ‘outside” to the Atlantic.

(Still in search of the “great” dolphin photo!)

We were also kept company today by numerous black flies, though the wind was strong enough to mostly keep them from being a nuisance.  We’re glad to have screens on our ports, hatches and doors, and will close things up, run the generator and turn on the air conditioning if necessary. It’s 85 degrees today, so plenty warm.

We’ve gotten really good at trading off helm duty, finding other things to do when we’re not the person at the helm, and working on navigation together any time things get a bit confusing.

Unlike in Florida where we successfully set the anchor the first time every time, we again had trouble the first time tonight and had to re-set a second time. Something about this Georgia mud bottom???