Tuesday, May 15th, 2012




Saint Simon Sounded headed the wrong way

We left Jekyll Island at 7:10 a.m. The next decent stop was reported to be Isle of Hope outside of Savannah. We followed a boat from the marina through marker 19 that was reported to have shoaling into the channel. We were close to high tide and we had no problems, but it was very narrow. This would be the first of many small creeks and passages that we traversed through Georgia. As we entered Saint Simon Sound, we continued to follow the boat in front of us. I was following the dotted line on the chart, but didn't realize that the boat in front of us actually went to Brunswick instead of following the Intracoastal. It took as 45 minutes to figure out that we weren't on the Intracoastal. The error occurred for a couple of reasons. I assumed the boat we were following was headed northbound on the Intracoastal, the electronic chart I was following had a dotted line that continued in the direction of the boat we were following and we were at the top of a new chart page. When we turned the page, the configuration of the next page was close enough to the Intracoastal that we thought we were on the Intracoastal. In fact, there is a small notation at the top of each chart page that indicates the Intracoastal channel. I don't think I'll ever miss that again. The error made a long day even longer. Between the horse flies that stalked us and the challenging creeks and back waters, we were exhausted by the end of the day. The horseflies were so bad, we moved inside. We arrived at Isle of Hope at 7:30 p.m. We had hamburgers on the grill and were glad to turn in early.