Charleston, SC to Jekyll Island GA, January 12-14

      We got a bit lucky preparing for this final leg of the journey because my sister Kathy texted me out of the blue one day to point out that she had a good friend who lived in Charleston and offered to drive our car back home if we wanted to drive to Charleston.  Since Omicron was going crazy and if we caught COVID it was going to put a big delay in our Bahamas plan, we weren't that crazy about flying, plus we always like the idea of buying another carload of food, wine and electronics.  We had a new microwave/convection oven, an air fryer, a space heater and I don't even know what else.  It was a mad day or two of loading, stowing and organizing.  By organizing, I mean I just threw everything into the "cabin of holding" and Lisa either figured something out or left it there.  Its probably good that no one was helping us because although we have three additional cabins on the boat, I've converted one of them into my workshop, another one was used exclusively to store space heaters, winter coats, blankets, hot water bottles, fleeces and sweatshirts.  The final cabin became the cabin of holding which at various points was stacked more or less floor to ceiling.  This arrangement makes doing the engine checks extra fun, because you have to clear everything out in order to lift the bed and get to the engines, turning a 10 minute task into an hour long ordeal.

They celebrated our last day in Charleston with a dredging operation
This required extremely loud horns to warn off boats trying to drive into the pipes

     Our plan was to leave around noon from Charleston and arrive at more or less the same time the next day in Jekyll Island, GA.  We had friends who just visited Jekyll and assured us we would love it there.  The weather forecast was such that we needed to leave 3 days before our marina reservation ended.  In some kind of minor miracle, we actually got money back.  Thus far it has been my experience that once the marina gets your cash, it never gives it back.  The wind was cooperative and we were able to get a nice wind pushing us off the dock when we went to depart, so that we basically just untied the lines and drifted into the river and back out to sea.  We had to dodge a few container ships on our way out of Charleston, but it was easy.  

Its very difficult to capture just how massive these ships are. 

     We had a pretty smooth overnight trip down.  There were a few container ships anchored off Savannah, GA that required us to zig zag around a bit and may have awoken me and caused me to rush up to make sure things were fine and offended my wife.  There was a very easy path into Jekyll from the north, but we couldn't go that way because it required passing under the bridge to the mainland, and once again we are too tall to pull that off.  We came in the southern side of the island via a very circuitous and twisty route.  The chart plotter claimed it would be deeper than it was and the buoys that help guide you in were missing, neither of which troubled us because it was still more than deep enough and not that hard to navigate.  After we were tied up, a few of the other boats were asking us lots of questions about how deep the water was, which made me wonder why they were so concerned because it seemed like a very chill entrance from my perspective (it was at high tide, which should have told me something).  I didn't think that much of these conversations at the time.

Our first view of the very lovely Jekyll Island.

   We found ourselves in a lovely marina with plenty of space and extremely friendly neighbors.  We planned to stay here nearly a week while the cold weather passed through and the marina was very strict with us about the need for us to leave when they told us to, because apparently they were going to be full very soon.