12/5/99 | Through Georgia and into Florida

anchor story #5

We knew we were going to have an epic trying to leave Charleston (see anchor story #4 in the previous log), and an epic it was. Our anchor chain was obviously wrapped around some submerged object. At first we just crossed our fingers and tried to weigh anchor as usual, but Britt only managed to pull in a few yards of chain before it came taut, and even with lots of throttle I couldn't free the boat. After a few token yanks, we figured we'd better at least get our anchor, since that's a $500+ piece of equipment. Britt let out enough chain for me to drive over to our anchor float and pulled the anchor up using our trip line. We had to fasten it to our spinnaker halyard and winch it up so we could haul it in over the side. When the anchor was safely aboard, we unshackled it from the chain, which we dropped back into the water.

The theory was that maybe without the anchor holding the end of the chain down, we'd be able to pull the chain out and around whatever it was wrapped around. We tested this theory from as many directions as we could, pulling this way and that, and only managed to reel in a small bit of the chain. To add insult to injury, we lost some of the additional slack that we'd had to let out in order to get over to our anchor, so now we had 90 feet of chain out.

We finally came to the conclusion that we'd better dive on it -- "we" being Britt. We have scuba gear, except for tanks, and Alex on Odyssey offered to loan Britt his tank. We had originally tried to get out as the tide was just starting to come in; with fairly slack tide we figured we wouldn't be fighting the current while working with the anchor, and a rising tide would give us a favorable current if we did make it out. But while we were working, the current increased, and with the wicked rip through the anchorage, there was no way Britt was going to dive until near slack current at high tide. (He needed to dive before the current changed direction, though, because we planned to tie to another boat while he was freeing the chain, and a current change would swing both boats around. If there had been no other boat around to tie to, we would have had to take the second anchor out in the dinghy and drop it, but we were reluctant to do this in case it got fouled on the same junk.) So at one in the afternoon, Britt strapped on his gear and I manned the windlass to slack the chain so he could work it. We had another friend standing by in his dinghy to help if needed, and the owner of the boat we had temporarily tied to was also watching and ready to help.

Britt followed the chain down, and we watched his bubbles. After about ten minutes, he surfaced to report what he'd found. The chain was a big mess, wrapped around a bunch of huge concrete piles, perhaps 2 feet in diameter and 10 feet high. They'd collapsed around the chain, possibly when we were initially pulling to try to free it, so there was no way we'd have been able to get it without diving. He found this all out by touch, since it was totally black as soon as he'd gone down only ten feet or so, and it was more than twice that to the bottom.

He submerged again, this time for twenty minutes, and I could feel the chain thrumming and groaning as he unwound it. When he came back up, he was shivering and tired, but he had gotten all the chain free! I cranked it all aboard while our friend in the dinghy helped him out of the water, then we untied from our temporary mooring and drove over to another boat, where we rafted up until we could reattach our anchor to our chain. It was too late to leave Charleston by then, so we reanchored for the night -- far away from those nasty submerged blocks!

(Later we rechecked the chart, and saw "dolphins" marked where we had anchored. We guess they were old mooring blocks that had since fallen down and been abandoned. Next time we will pay special attention when the chart shows things that don't appear to be there, because they could very well be there underwater.)

the wonders of technology

One of the things we did while in Charleston was install the new GPS which had been in a box since Annapolis. We've been using a handheld up to now, which we have had inside on the nav table next to the computer. We've been relying strictly on electronic charts since Hampton. Navigation has been a two-person operation, with one person driving and the other person watching the progress of our little boat icon steadily marching across the computer chart, and every so often popping out to the cockpit with a comment, "More to the left," or "Don't go too close to the next mark."

Now that we have a GPS in the cockpit, the person at the helm has a lot more information. Each night we make a route for the next day on the computer, and in the morning we upload it to the GPS. The highway display shows exactly where to steer to make the next waypoint.

The GPS has been blamed for a general decline in the quality of seamanship, since it's easy to get into trouble by following the display slavishly without using common sense. Even seasoned and experienced sailors occasionally make rather boneheaded maneuvers due to an over-reliance on electronics. Needless to say, we do too.

The most common thing we need to watch out for is when the route doesn't precisely follow the optimal path. We've both gotten into shallow water a few times by watching the GPS and not the channel marks. The opposite has happened a few times as well -- we set the route to avoid encroaching shoals that we can see on the chart but aren't clear from the channel marks, but if the helmsman decides to shortcut the GPS route by just following the marks, we get in trouble anyway.

I almost got into some real trouble by using the GPS instead of my eyeballs one day. We were on a portion of the ICW which followed a shipping lane out almost to the ocean inlet before turning; it was broad and deep, so I wasn't paying much attention to navigating. I was sitting down with my feet on the wheel, keeping one eye on the GPS to check my course, but mostly just relaxing and watching the dolphins play in the water beside the boat. Suddenly, a green marker buoy went by, not six feet away. Yikes! Those buoys are massive, and if we'd hit it we would have been the worse for the encounter.

touching bottom

We've been gleefully countering all the grounding stories we hear with, "Well, we haven't gone aground in the ICW -- yet!" The Georgia marsh put an emphatic end to our boasting shortly after leaving Thunderbolt, near Savannah. Britt was at the wheel and I was facing backwards, and we were talking about whether or not we ought to install a diesel heater, when suddenly we slowed way down. "Gee, the current's gotten really strong all of a sudden...oops." I looked around, only to see that we were on the wrong side of a red daymark. Britt had been busy talking with me and hadn't done more than glance at the marker. A bird's nest on top of it made the triangle look like a square, and the sun angle was such that he couldn't tell what color it was, and he just assumed it was green. Fortunately the bottom was soft mud, and we easily backed out.

A couple of days later we plowed through the mud again, in the narrow channel near Jekyll Island. This time I was at the wheel, keeping to the right side of the channel as a fishing boat passed, only to turn a corner and see a huge barge trailing pipes, pushed by three small tugs. I watched the depthsounder readings drop as we got squeezed between them and a bare mudflat. The tugs tried to push the barge more into the center of the channel, but we probably went thirty yards or so with the bottom of our keel in the mud before we were able to turn into deeper water.

fortitude

We decided to take an alternate route near St. Simon Island in order to see Fort Frederica National Monument. This ruin is what's left of a military town established in the 1730's as a defense against Spanish incursions into the English colonies. The Spanish had Florida and wanted to expand north; the English had the Carolinas and wanted to expand south. Georgia was disputed territory. After the Spanish landed on St. Simon Island and were defeated by the soldiers of Fort Frederica in the "Battle of Bloody Marsh," there was no longer a reason for a military presence at the town, which was abandoned soon after.

We entered the Frederica River at its northern junction with the ICW and followed its twists and turns to the National Monument. The river is not very wide, and it seemed strange to be piloting our relatively outsized craft through its waters; a canoe would have been more appropriate! We wound through the marsh until we were alongside St. Simon Island, where we anchored in front of Fort Frederica and dinghied ashore. (The National Park Service thoughtfully installed a dinghy dock!)

The old townsite is now a beautiful park, studded with orange trees and huge live oaks dripping Spanish moss. Not many buildings still stand, but archeologists have found lots of artifacts, and several building foundations have been excavated. A lot is known about the town and its inhabitants from the written accounts of the period. We explored the ruins and saw a rather cheesy movie about Frederica in the visitor's center.

The next day we continued on the Frederica River to its southern junction with the ICW, and then on to Fernandina Beach. This is an old town on Amelia Island, about as far northeast as you can be and still be in Florida. As we passed the St. Mary's River inlet, we noticed a huge fort on the north end of the island. The next day we took our bicycles ashore and visited the fort.

Fort Clinch was begun in 1847 but not completed until 1867. In 1861 it was abandoned by the Union and occupied by the Confederates; a year later it was abandoned by the Confederates and occupied by the Union. No battle was fought there, and it was abandoned by everyone after 1898. The property was purchased and renovated by the state of Florida in 1935 as part of a new state park.

The fort is in remarkable shape for having been in disuse for so long. 99% of its walls are original; apparently sand had covered much of the brick walls, which preserved the structure well. The rooms inside the outer walls have vaulted ceilings made of brick, and elegant slate floors. The lintels and steps are massive chunks of granite.

We got a real bonus at Fort Clinch -- a chance to do some mountain biking! The access road is surrounded by a magnificent singletrack loop, so we opted for the trail instead of the road. Up to now we thought that Florida was flat, but they must have dug some hills up from somewhere, because that trail was a curvy, bumpy ride through a live oak and palmetto jungle. It was great fun, but we are nowhere in the shape we used to be in back in Colorado, and our legs are going to complain tomorrow!

On our way to Fernandina, we passed the big-ship entrance to Brunswick, Georgia. Brunswick bills itself as the "westernmost port on the east coast."  Looking at the map, it's interesting to see that we have come very far not only south but also west. Or at least it seems far to us, at our snail's pace. We left Norfolk, mile 0 on the ICW, a month ago. Now we're just over the border into Florida, having passed through parts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. It seems like a long way -- but we've come only a little more than 700 miles in the past month. I-95 would have gotten us here in two days! But the point for us is the journey, and we're still on it. In a few days we'll lift anchor and head south again.