Port Royal to Thunderbolt to Kilkenny to Duplin River to Jekyll Island to Sisters Creek

Day #435; Loop Miles to Date = 5,159

Phew! The last week just flew by...since our last posting, we left South Carolina, blew through Georgia, and now are finally in Florida! We also crossed a milestone of sorts this week, as we crossed over the 5,000 mile mark in our journey thus far. So, now a brief recap, and a bunch of pics...

Thunderbolt Marina (Thunderbolt, GA) was a nice stop for us. We ended up staying an extra day here because of some fog that rolled in. We needed to depart this location fairly early in the morning to time some tidal fluctuations, and the fog prevented us on the morning we planned to depart. So, we stayed an extra day here, which gave us the chance to take an afternoon and go into Savannah to walk around. We ate some mediocre food, had fun poking around a bunch of shops, and eventually got chased back to the marina by a rainstorm and darkness.

Nothing really notable about this...we saw it on the riverfront in Savannah. And since it was a tug, we were compelled to take a picture.

This section of travel has some extreme tide conditions. On this day, there was a 10+ foot tidal change during the day. The implication to us is that we need to account for this in our trip planning...both from a depth perspective and from a current perspective. This was obviously at high tide, but most markers aren't like this...this one needs to be replaced!

From Savannah we stopped at Kilkenny, GA at a small marina just about 2 miles off of the ICW. This was a really small marina, probably family owned, old and a bit dilapidated, but functional for us for one night. We got rained on walking the pups, but otherwise a peaceful night.

Kilkenny had floating docks...more or less. They floated, but they were some of the ricketiest docks we've been on. To the point that when it was raining and dark, we chose to walk the dogs one at a time - it was easy to envision a potential disaster!

This was the entire flotilla of boats spending the night here.

One cool thing was that late in the day, 30 or so egrets flew in to the trees right near the boat. This picture doesn't do it justice, but all of them roosted here all night. And the next morning we also discovered that there were a handful of night herons who flew in overnight and were spending the morning in the same roost. Kinda neat.

After Kilkenny, we headed for an anchorage that we had used on the way north...Duplin River. And as it turned out, both of the boats who were on the dock at Kilkenny joined us in the same anchorage. Each of us had 2 dogs aboard, and this is one of the few spots in this section of the ICW where there is anything useful for walking the dogs. This is a ferry stop on Sapelo Island, and there is a floating dock here that we can use for dinghy-walking the pups. The only real issue we had was in the morning...we needed to leave early again, and we awoke to find a fairly heavy wind was fighting a fairly strong current. This wasn't unexpected, but the conditions for launching the dinghy and getting on and off the boat were much less than ideal. We managed...but it wasn't fun.

From the anchorage, we traveled to Jekyll Island, GA. This was a great one-night stop. Friendly folks, floating concrete docks, courtesy golf carts to run into the small town there and see the beach. We enjoyed it.

The beach was nice...but cool and very windy. It looks like Sandy got a new hairdo, but it's really just the wind blowing her hair sideways!

Our departure this morning from Jekyll Island was early...this was the sun just starting to rise...we are already underway.

The reason that we left so early was that our destination was Sisters Creek in Jacksonville. This is a free dock, so there is really no way to know if there is going to be room until you show up. We also were able to time the currents and tides to our advantage and made terrific time. We had 56 miles to cover, and we were all secure in our spot at the dock before 1pm. As it turned out, it is now about 4 pm and no additional boats have arrived. There are 3 sailboats here who were here when we arrived, and there is room for a couple of more boats as well. It was a nice travel day...we had some heavy seas in St. Andrews sound for about 20 minutes, but otherwise a delightful day.

Some of the collateral damage from Matthew still being cleaned up. This was near Fernandina Beach, FL. Obviously this barge was loaded with unfortunate casualties from the storm...a real shame.

Just one example of some of the other types of damage that we saw on the way down.

All for now...tomorrow we will finally be at our destination for Christmas...Ortega River Marina in Jacksonville. It is only about 25 more miles to go, and we've been there before, so we expect a peaceful transit through the Jacksonville port and downtown area. We are looking forward to being stationary for a bit!