Too much excitement!

This post is supposed to be from Savannah, but it’s not. We were headed to Savannah everything going fine until… the auto pilot stopped working.

We were about 15 miles off the coast of FL roughly abeam of Jacksonville, and the auto pilot started going off course. We tried resetting it many times, but no luck. It would work for a while and then not.

After many hours of trying to hand steer Stray Catz in a quartering sea, we finally threw in the towel. We hove to and plotted a course for what I thought was St Simons Island, GA. It turns out I must have been tired, because it was St Marys, GA instead. Oops, but it gave us the opportunity to explore Cumberland Island, and rest.

After a day of rest and exploration, we took off for St Simons Island via the intra coastal waterway. This started out to be a very pretty trip. Lots of dolphins. Roseate Spoonbills. Kylan saw a stingray do a flip out of the water.  Beautiful country. Beautiful day.  Until St Andrew Sound. That’s where everything went down hill.

I had this great idea that we would scoot out to the ocean and go around the Atlantic side of Jekyll Island. According to the charts I had, it should have been ok. The charts were wrong. We headed out to sea, but the charts and the channel marks didn’t line up. When the depth gauge read way more shallow than it should, and way more shallow than I was with two miles from land, I did an emergency turn around and started following my tracks back the way  I came. While on the way back, I called TowBoat US and asked for some info. They said ABSOLUTELY DON’T go that way.    I wished I would have called them hours sooner.

Now the next problem. We have to go around the other side of Jekyll Island, and it’s low tide. Low tide was great for the one bridge we had to go under, but not so good for the narrow undredged channels we had to drive through. I do believe we were pushing a little mud at one point, but Stray Catz kept going.

We did finally make it to St Simons, GA and without any real incident, but for me, it was too much of the wrong kind of excitement for one day.