The weather forecast for this trip - July 9-11, 2011, looked good: SE breezes generally in the 10-15-knot range, with calm seas making for a nice easy downwind sail. The thunderstorms, which during this time of year are automatically forecast to occur daily (whether they actually do or not), had disappeared. The sky was white and heavy with haze but what clouds there were looked fairly benign. With conditions like these plus a generally flat, featureless coastline, photography was out of the question. However, the outgoing tide was in our favor for a morning departure through the Fort Pierce Inlet into the open water of the Atlantic Ocean. And so it was at 0725 on July 9 when we raised anchor and left the calm waters of Fort Pierce.
When making an overnight passage we generally prefer traveling 20-30 miles offshore to avoid most vessel traffic and rocky bits. We'd have done this anyway on this part of the coast, because we were northbound and the axis of the northbound Gulf Stream in our area was conveniently located about 20-30 miles offshore. Once we were well offshore we were delighted to find that we had a current assist of about 3 knots. We got lucky with the fair current, because instead of the forecast SE 10-15 knots of breeze, we actually experienced SE 1-6 knots - too light for sailing. With the Gulf Stream favoring us, we were able to putt along at fairly low Yanmar rpms, yet still maintain 8-9 knots SOG. Our 2-3 day sailing trip was transmogrifying into a 2-day/1-night jaunt.
Our speed gradually slowed after we rounded Cape Canaveral and our NNW course toward Georgia began to diverge from the Gulf Stream's NNE path. Instead of raising the main sail to get some balance and a little more boat speed, we deployed our new roller-furling staysail on our new inner forestay. Huzzah, we gained a half-knot, which kept our forward speed at 7 knots SOG or better for the last 100 miles. We're liking this new inner forestay action.
We saw very little wildlife on this passage - a few flying fish, two small pods of bottlenose dolphin, a brown booby, and a southbound green sea turtle that gave us big stink-eye. It was a quiet, warm, hazy kind of trip.
The timing of our afternoon arrival at Brunswick's nearest inlet - St. Simons Sound - seemed excellent: slightly before high tide slack. As we approached the sea buoy that would guide us to the buoys of the 5-mile-long entrance channel, we saw a car carrier through the heavy haze. Our AIS showed the carrier to be at anchor - which it was, until we got closer and wanted to maintain speed to reach the entrance channel before the tide turned foul. Naturally, this was the moment our VHF came alive with the voice of the car carrier's captain, informing us that he'd just begun raising anchor to proceed into the entrance channel, and would we please be so kind as to let him go first. Since he was significantly larger, heavier and faster than we are, our courtesy was a foregone conclusion.
Bonus: this was the Willenius Wilhelmsen car carrier "Othello," which we'd last seen in February 2011 at the Panama Canal! We told the captain so. Ehhhh, he didn't remember us.
We followed Othello and a couple smaller boats into the entrance channel. As the cruising guides will tell you the dredged approach to St. Simons Sound Inlet is deep, well marked and easy to follow as long as you don't stray onto the shoals on either side of the sets of buoys. We had no problems despite visibilty of no more than 3/4 mile due to haze and smoke from a distant wildfire; we saw all the channel buoys and series of range markers through binoculars if not with the naked eye. The crosswinds piped up from 7kt. to 22kt. as a rain cell rolled past, but the seas remained manageable. Nevertheless, given that a boat has to travel 5 miles along this entrance channel before it enters St. Simons Sound itself, I'd sure hate to try this approach when the seas were up.
Anyway, once we entered St. Simons Sound it was late in the day and we still had 9-10 miles to go up the Brunswick and East Rivers to our destination. Note to self: from the sea buoy to Brunswick via the St. Simons Sound is about 15 miles and takes about 3 hours.
Instead of pressing on we decided to anchor for the night in the Brunswick River, along the NW side of Jekyll Island and off the section of the shipping channel that overlaps the ICW. The anchorage area is bordered by a couple sets of range markers. Reading these words it seems the anchorage would be uncomfortable but it turned out to be the nicest anchorage we've yet seen along the ICW. Depths were a reassuring 20'-30' over a large area, the holding was excellent, the anchorage was quiet except for birdsong, and with your back to Brunswick's big pulp mill the views were of NW Jekyll Island's trees and marshland instead of rows of McMansions with for-sale signs in front of them. In other words, not bad at all.
To see this anchorage for yourself, step off the ICW north of Jekyll Creek and just SE of green buoy "21." Go east several boat lengths, select a spot anywhere in the vicinity of 31deg.06'404N/081deg.25'661W, and tell us what you think.
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