Savannah

Ah, back to Savannah, to family and friends and a few days off of the boat. 
You probably think that sailing is all fun and sun soaked sailing, but noooo.....especially before we go for an overnighter we do a lot of checks and changes.  The diesel engine filters have to be checked and changed. A dirty job at the best.

Then there are little things like checking the water intake filter for the engine to see if it's clogged with sea grasses - of course, this filter is sideways under the mattress in our berth. We check the impeller for the speed sensor - this means pulling out a plug from the bottom of the boat and pushing in a dummy plug asap while ocean water spews upwards into the boat.  A wet project.  Little water bugs always come in so we have to treat the water in the boat with bleach.  It's never ending fun.

The trip itself was uneventful. We left St Augustine at the 11:00 AM opening of the newly rebuilt Bridge of Lions, at slack high tide. It's never a good idea to leave an inlet with wind against tide, and incoming tide can give as much as 4 kts of current against us at this inlet. We had mild winds that clocked from the East, to SE, S, SW, just as predicted. There was a surprising 1.5 kt current against us for the first few hours. We motorsailed most of the way until the wee hours of Saturady morning, when we had 20 kts pushing us the rest of the way to the Ossabaw sound. We arrived at the crack of dawn, timed so that we had incoming current at Ossabaw, yet enough light to see the crab pot floats, and so reached our destination at about 9:00 AM.

More fun at Beth's - friend Randy had a birthday so Beth arranged a little birthday dinner party at the house for him.  That's Randy at the far right, in the green shirt.

Our plan now is to leave Wednesday at oh-dark-early to take advantage of the tide and do another long trip to at least Morehead City, arriving Thursday evening.  IF all goes well and the weather continues to cooperate, we may well just continue our trip"outside" to the Chesapeake rather than stopping at Morehead City and doing the ICW to Norfolk .  Won't know for sure until we near Morehead City on Thursday evening.