South of Savannah

We made our way down the Savannah River in light  rain and continued warm temperatures.  (It went up to about 77 degrees yesterday.)  We could have stayed a night free at the River Bend Marina in Thunderbolt, GA 14 miles from our start in Savannah.  We pulled in to get fuel only to discover that they were closed for the holidays.  That turned out to be fine because I needed to pull our speedometer paddlewheel out of the bottom of the boat to free it up.  It was nice to be able to sit on someone's fuel dock with no pressure to move on.  Ordinarily I wouldn't be concerned about not getting a speed reading from the paddlewheel because I can get the speed of the boat from the GPS.  My problem was that the speed data is shared with the autopilot and the autopilot refuses to work without the speed data from the paddlewheel.  I should be able to reprogram the autopilot to work without the speed data but it was especially stubborn today - refusing to even accept reprogramming.

Taking the speedometer out of the bottom of the boat has some excitement and mess associated with it.  Pulling it out leaves a one inch hole in the hull.  A small geyser erupts from the hole while I fumble around trying to put a plug in it.  The in-rushing water makes it a little difficult to get that plug in just the right place as fast as I would like.  One of our carpets is a little wet from this exercise - but the paddlewheel is now freed up and I can continue steering the boat with the autopilot.  I prefer using the autopilot to steering by hand because the autopilot doesn't get distracted and forget to look where it's going.  I can't just let it do its own thing in the ICW but I can press +10 degrees or -10 degrees to adjust the course to the curves of the river.

Under a bridge and across the river we stopped at Bahia Bleu for $4.39/gallon diesel fuel.  It is important to fill up at this point because with the exception of one stop 5 miles down river there will be no more fuel available to us for 100 miles.  We expect to be well off the grid tomorrow deep in the swamps of Georgia with no cell coverage.

We ended our day early in the Vernon River.  We didn't realize until we talked with Chad (cruisingsabbatical.com) that we are anchored in exactly the same place he stopped when he was single handing 2 years ago.  We looked at his blog and discovered that the same shrimp boat that he took a picture of is still anchored out in the same area it was when he came through.  How do we know it's the same?  Dammit we know.  That is the boat's name: Dammit.  How many shrimpers could have that same name and be anchored in the same spot?

Dammit has been here a long time and seems to be listing
badly to port.

It is very pretty here with marshes on one side and wealthy large homes on the other.  No wind tonight but plenty of current.  We used the change in current to test my newest iPhone app: "DragQueen."  No, it didn't help me dress up in Maryanne's clothes.  DragQueen is an app that tells you when your anchor is dragging.  When the current changed on the river we moved far enough to set off the siren alarm on the DragQueen app.  It's great to know it works.  Now when we have high winds in an anchorage that is not in a river I can sleep soundly until the alarm goes off.

Sorry, no time to upload pix tonight.  We'll add them next time around.