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After three great nights in Charleston, new crew Ken Puterbaugh and I cast off early Friday morning, 22 October for an adventure into what felt like the twilight zone at the B&B Seafood place on Mosquito Creek. Lots of wonderful people made us feel welcome. It was quite a difference from the high style marina in Charleston, but every bit as good an experience.
One of the major highlights so far occurred along a quiet little creek. That is non other than an American Bald Eagle up there!
After that great experience, everything else seems almost insignificant.
Except, of course, Ken driving the boat with a racer's edge, concentrating as though we were about to finish a big race. Yes, Ken has done a lot of race driving, but after a few miles on the ICW, he sorta zoned out and really relaxed.
Another interesting sight on the ICW is what is known as a "Range". This is two lights and red/white striped boards situated at a distance from one another and perfectly aligned with the center of a narrow channel. The range mark further away is higher so that as a boat moves down-channel, the pilot keeps the two aligned and stays in center channel where, hopefully, the deepest water is located.
These two are shown slightly off center for clarity.
When shrimp boats have hauled up as many shrimp as possible, they pull off to the side and empty them into the hold, as these two are doing.
The Savannah River is long, it took us most of two hours to get up the eight miles from the ICW to the downtown docks. We could have done it in just a little over an hour if we could have waited for the tide to change. On the ICW, there's always a tradeoff.
There is lots of commercial activity on this river, such as immense container ships. The following three pictures are typical.
Containers are either forty feet or twenty feet long by around nine feet high and a little less wide. All of the containers you are seeing are the forty footers.
If you look closely, you may be able to pick out some crew men for scale.
And.. Here's a stern shot. That stack of six high will go almost sixty feet high!
Savannah is quite striking from a water approach. This picture does not do justice to the beauty. The city hall dome is gold in the bright sun.
Tides in Savannah have almost an eight foot range. The first photo is at about half tide.
High tide
This is high tide, early morning.
The waterfront seems to be crisscrossed with boats going everywhere.
Our 33 footer is dwarfed by "Snow Goose" one of the mega yachts. She's a hundred fifteen feet and her mast is 155 feet tall.
Beautiful. She's about 10 years old and cost about 10 million to build.
Ashore, Ken looked like an exotic sea captain and people kept asking him if Snow Goose were his.
This fellow was blowing some prety good sounds on his sax and appeared to be immersed in his wonderful music.
Probably one of the coolest places to live in Savannah has to be an apartment above the commercial establishments on River Street.
Many of them have balconies for viewing the mileau below.
By the way, that's Ken contemplating in the lower right.
Another interesting aspect of the River Street district is the many different ramps and stairs used to walk or drive to normal street level from the stores below on the river.
This ramp is made of cobblestones rubbed smooth by the thousannds of feet that have used them for at least a century. The commercial establishments are in renovated cotton warehouses built a century or more ago. One first walks up the fairly steep cobblestones and then climbs about twenty or more feet of stairs to finally arrive at street level.
The many angles fascinated me and I had to share it.
This is the Cotton Exchange Building circa 1890's
I'll be leaving Savannah tomorrow, Wednesday October 27 and singlehanding down Georgia into Florida. Ken had to go back to Columbus to take care of a business matter that cropped up.
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