Day 53-54

We left Savannah and my friend Trey's house rested and relaxed. It had been a great stop-over. We motored on down the tidal rivers of the Georgia coast to Cattle Pen Creek on St. Catherine's Island for a quiet, lonely anchorage out in the marshes.


The next day, tired of motoring and the Intracoastal Waterway's ever looming threat of running aground on its shifting shoals and twisting turns, we decided to head out to sea once more, to find a little elbow room in the deep waters of the North Atlantic. The weather report on the radio was calling for small waves and a steady west wind, perfect for a fast run south to St. Simons Island and the port of Brunswick, GA.

Out in the ocean however, we discovered that the forecast had been a bit optimistic. The wind wasn't west, it wasn't even southwest. It was south, right on our nose, strong and gusty and whipping up steep, choppy seas. The following six hours were a wet and wild ride, beating to windward, rain gear on, salt spray sweeping the deck, Strolla bucking and thrashing and clawing her way south, us gleefully perched on her back.


Even with the strong winds, however, we weren't making enough headway to reach port by dark. Soon the sun was dropping low on our right and it was time to start up the engine. We kept the sails set and filled while we waited for it to warm up. Five minutes is what the owner's manual recommends. Four and a half minutes later the engine faltered and stumble and then, with a few sickly coughs, died.

I don't find troubleshooting a stalled engine down in the hold of a sharply heaving boat to be too terribly pleasant. Ours is in a tight, awkward, and poorly lit area with plenty of sharp corners and bulges, carefully placed to inflict maximum pain. Now, with Strolla flinging me bodily into the engine every few seconds, a few bumps and bruises were unavoidable. I squirmed my way into a somewhat stable position from which to begin my tinkering. I didn't have time to get much done.

I've always felt I had a fairly strong stomach, an important trait in a sailor but, backwards, head down, lurching and jolting with the boat, the heady scent of diesel fuel filling my nose, I began to feel a bit queasy. Back up on deck for air, I relieved Pete at the helm and he went down for a look. Through his careful coaxing, the motor gasped briefly back to life only to expire once more.

We kept sailing and, zigzagging our way south into the wind, we arrived at the mouth of St. Simons Sound around 8:00 p.m. The wind had shifted during this time and was now coming out of the Southwest. The high tide had just turned and was beginning its ebb. To get to Brunswick, we would have to work our way up the approach channel in the dark, against the wind and the tide, shoals on either side, with no motor. An approach into any other nearby inlet would pose the same difficulties only with a less clearly marked channel. The only other option was to sail through the night, arriving in Fernandina Beach, FL, the next port of any size, around sunrise. It would be a hard night. Wind and waves were predicted to increase but, we would be able to enter the inlet in daylight and with the tide in our favor.

It was then, tired and frustrated, that I made a very bad decision. I decided to head in St. Simons Sound. Even at the time I knew it was not the prudent choice, but I thought we could get away with it. Pete and I wanted the day to be over, not extended for another ten hours. Hopefully with a little more hard work and a little luck, we'd soon be able to tie up and turn in.

Progress up the sound was brutally slow. In order to stay within the channel buoys we had to tack almost every ten minutes. In those few seconds it took for the boat to nose its way across the wind, our forward momentum would melt to nothing and the tide would sweep us backwards. Then finally, with a snap the sails would fill on our new tack and we could continue our slow slog onward. In two hours we managed to cover barely three miles. Still, we kept at it, fighting our way along doggedly rather than recognizing this lost cause for what it was and returning to the safety of deeper open water.

Slowly, born of desperation, we began to cheat. In an effort to squeeze in longer tacks, we began going further and further outside the channel buoys. After several hours we broke from the marked channel altogether, making our way through an opening in the shoals shown on our chart and heading off on a long starboard tack, then working our way onward from there. Pete and I both should have been aware, based on many prior experiences, that shoals shift. As it turned out, such was the case here. On a port tack, in what was supposed to be 21 ft of water, we ran hard aground.


Things happened very fast after that. The boat, which was already heeled over by the strong wind, was now bent even more dramatically on its side by the current. With the keel stuck fast, it then twisted around to lie broadside to the wind, waves and current, which combined to form a huge eddy of churning, boiling water on its lee side. Waves to windward were now hitting the exposed side of the hull with the sickening regularity of a sledge hammer, knocking gear across the cabin and making the rigging shiver with each impact.

There was no chance of setting a kedging anchor in any direction except directly downwind. In our non motorized dinghy, we couldn't hope to hold our position against the wind and current. This meant we couldn't set the anchor off our stern to back ourselves off as we usually did. Setting an anchor downwind would mean trying to kedge ourselves free by dragging the boat sideways and over the top of the very shoal the wind and tide were pushing us into. It didn't seem likely to work. We tried it anyway. It didn't work.

After the kedge failed, there wasn't much left to do but wait. Pete was feeling wide awake now so I let him have first watch and turned in to try and catch some sleep. I didn't feel too sleepy anymore either. I fully expected that in a few hours the incoming tide would overflow the starboard gunwale which was now only a few inches above the water. The boat would then be swamped and we'd be putting in a rather urgent call to the Coast Guard.

Laying on the cabin floor at the foot of the companionway I listened to the pounding on the hull and waited for the first cold trickle of salt water to come pooling around my head, a signal that it was time to get on the radio. Half an hour later Pete called down to tell me the dinghy had broken free. I came up on deck just in time to see its dark form disappearing into the night, heading out to sea. All we could do was watch. I went wearily back to my makeshift bed.

Several hours later the tide turned. The weather forecast, at least for where we were, was once again wrong. The wind and waves did not increase, but actually seemed to lessen. So, the rising water did not swamp us but instead gently lifted us up until we were once again level and free, held in place only by the kedge anchor that we'd left out.

We set the jib and main, sailed off our anchor, the first time we'd done that, and straight back to the buoyed channel. We still had to beat our way into the wind to make port, but now the tide was with us and each tack gained us distance. We decided to skip going all the way to Brunswick and settled on a much closer marina on St. Simons Island. Pete stood at the bow with the spotlight, picking channel markers out of the darkness and, feeling our way along, we navigated the rest of our way without incident.

The final challenge of the night was docking without a motor. Pete and I had never tried that before. We'd have to sail in. This is a tricky maneuver because there is no reverse with sails. The only way to stop yourself is to leap onto the wharf with a dock line. We pulled it off perfectly. To anyone watching we looked like cool professionals. The time was 5:15 a.m.