I can’t believe another week has gone by already, time is just flying by with a blur.
The last time I posted we were in Turner Creek, Georgia, and since then we have made it all the way through Georgia and the swamplands full of alligators and snakes to Florida. We made really good time – we arrived here at Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach on Saturday morning. Although we made good time it seems like weeks have past since Turner Creek.
When we left Turner Creek and headed south, we knew a storm was coming so we had to make plans ahead of time to stop. I had been watching the weather and had a plan to make it to Morningstar Marina just before the storm hit.
All good plans – or should I say best laid plans – don’t seem to always work out. About twelve o’clock mid day the sky turned ugly with dark clouds the high winds going one way and the low wind going right in our face, no sailing today. Trina and I talked about how bad it was starting to look and decided we would go a bit further and checked the charts for an “out” if it got real bad. Of course it got bad before they predicted, we should have had until three in the afternoon but not to our surprise at two o’clock the sky was dark as just before nightfall and the wind had picked up to thirty knots with super high gusts.
The boat started to feel real small as it was tossed around like a toy boat in a bath tub. We decided we would not make it to the first choice destination at this point we were getting slammed. We decided to go up a river,the South Altamaha, about four miles inland, even though it had cautions of high currents and that it is almost impossible to go in or out against the current. There was no choice at this point, we had heard over the radio the transmission of the boat called the Blue Moon that they were at the scene of another boat that had flipped and capsized – they were picking people out of the water.
If you have never been out there, the sheer terror of all this going on and you are in the same water listening to it unfold makes one realize the decisions we make can save a life. We were glad to be in the river for sure. The entrance to the river was an ugly one and I wasn’t sure we were supposed to go in there, to our luck we made it into the river at slack tide, no current. We were relieved to a degree, it seemed to be the longest four miles of the whole trip. We traveled turning the nose of the sailboat into the wind as the high gusts seem to want to put us on our side. I was very happy to see the marina up ahead after that last turn as the rain started to fall and the wind was gusting to fifty four miles an hour. The dock hands ran to the boat and helped us tie it in, it was safe and so were we. Then it was done – over just like that- in three hours the front had passed and we were sitting in the restaurant having a sandwich it was still windy but the sun even tried to come out.
This brings me to my first thought can you imagine what those guys on the other boat were thinking when they landed in the water? OMG… I couldn’t even guess myself.
We were told to head out as soon as we could in the morning to beat the tide or we would have to wait for the next tide that would occur on the next day. We gathered our things and headed out down the river the tide was high and it looked so different. We were headed out the same way we went in but it kept getting too shallow – at two points we just touched the bottom, almost ran aground, and then we realized just how lucky we were the day before, or was it luck?
This brings me to my next thought, earlier I mentioned what good time we had made and about the decisions that we make. We almost didn’t leave that morning but something said leave so we did, we made it to a perfect anchorage with the dolphins coming right to the sailboat and in just a couple days we were putting out dock lines here at Beach Marine, Jacksonville Beach, Florida, just before the next big storm. So my second thought is – It’s good to follow that gut instinct and I am glad we did the next storm lasted for three days with high winds and four inches of rain every twenty four hours!
So we are safe and sound and the sun has returned we will be here for the week and fly home next Tuesday for the holidays with the kids. Driving the car back so we can have wheels while we are here.
Wolfbernz
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