Weather or Not? - Luke's Story

Weather is everything -- if it's good, the journey is easy and pleasant, if it's bad -- it's at least tedious, probably uncomfortable and just a pain. This last overnighter from Ossabaw Sound, south of Savannah, 72 nautical miles to St Marys on the Florida border, is an example of how it went well.

This NOAA web site (one of many) presents a good overview of fronts and weather for the next few days. It showed a well defined cold front, inland and parallel to the Georgia coast, on Monday afternoon. It was to move off shore late Monday night. As we left Ossabaw Sound, we could clearly see the frontal clouds in a line over the coast.

Another web site Passageweather.com predicted the progression of winds during the night. This showed that initially we would have relatively light winds from the SW, (about 10 kts) on the nose during the first part of the evening. Consistent with the passing of the front, sometime between 10 PM and 1 AM, the wind would clock to from the West, then NW then N and finally NNE and build a bit as the night progressed. All these directions would make sailing, rather than motoring,  possible. Another NOAA Coastal Forecast web site gave us a sanity check and confirmed all this in less detail.

In fact, at about 10:30 PM, the wind started clocking to the west. At midnight, when Bobbie finished her tour of sleeping, we raised the sails and were able to sail the rest of the night. The wind increased to 15 to 20 kts, and we had an easy downwind run. After the front, we were followed by a nearly full moon sparkling on the water, and passed a number of brightly lit shrimp boats (we think) working through the night.

Why through the night? Well, we were 12 miles up Ossabaw Sound, 72 miles to St Marys channel entrance, and 6 miles into St Marys. That's 90 miles. We wanted to leave Ossabaw Sound and arrive at St Marys in daylight. While we can generally sustain at least 6.5 kts, we can't plan on more than 6 kts. Even at 7 kts, 72 miles is 13 hours, and we only have about 10 hours of daylight these days. So, we kept it slow, and did the easy 72 miles between 5:45 PM and 6:45 AM.