Sunday, October 30, 2011

Savannah at Thunderbird Marina at a dock

Morning at Beaufort City Marina - with a typical ICW swing bridge in the background
It was chilly here this morning with a low around 45 - cold for here. We find ourselves more in the thick of the migration south than last year. Part of the reason I think is that this year we've timed our passages through the shallow sections for high tides and most of the other snowbirds have the same plans. At any rate, the route south is much more relaxed this year than last (except for Edisto River anchorage!!)

Found on the ICW!
Just to add to the excitement, the Garmin chartplotter stopped displaying depth soundings for some unknown reason. Everything else seemsed to work fine, just not depth readings. And, oh yes, the genset didn't pump any cooling water so I had to shut that off too. Does that count as three events? The genset adversion to passing water was soon cured with a good cleaning but the chartplotter still doesn't display depths. Luckily, I have the iPad2 and it's four charting programs - so we've been using the iPad2 for depths until I can either fix the Garmin or buy another unit.

High today was 66 with winds 15 to 20 kts out of the north but we were toasty in our enclosure as we motor sailed south. There are so many turns in the ICW that it's difficult having any stretch in any one direction which makes it tough to sail even with good winds so we put up the mainsail and did the best we could.

Huge bow for ocean going waves?
Thunderbird marina is a huge complex with ocean going vessels in for outfitting and/or repairs. The entire facility is first rate and I would highly recommend the marina for an overnight stay. On Monday we're headed for a remote anchorage, the Wahoo River. It's not supposed to have such a severe current as our last disaster anchorage. Meanwhile, we can't access our remote cameras back home in Lagrangeville, NY due to a power outage from the winter storm that dumped a foot or so of snow in the area. Well I'm sure everything will sort itself out, we'll take our time down here.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Ann & Bob

I hope all is well with you :) Just wanted to send a note to give a huge thank you for sharing all the great info. Learned a lot. I've spent a lot of time at your site, and I've taken a lot of it and put it into a sort of guide that I'm preparing for a trip from Lake Ontario, down to Panama. I'm much further ahead of the game than I would have been without blogs like yours.

Best wishes,

Jason Kyriakou
Toronto, Canada