Georgia

Stayed in Brunswick a second night and ate a fine Easter Brunch at the newly opened 4th of May Restaurant (named after the owner's mother's birthday) which featured fried chicken and scalloped pineapple along with the other usual holiday dishes and unusual-to-us southern specialties.

Yesterday, we started out at 7 AM because we were trying to make a lot of distance fast and relatively early in the day, as there was a storm forecast for later. Usually we can hop, skip, and jump north in smaller increments, from 15 to 45 miles. But there were no marinas on this isolated part of the water for 70 miles.

I spent most of the blustery hours down below while Alan motored us along the GA ICW. We both got a bit nervous about whether we could make it with the limited amount of gas we can carry. The conundrum is...if we go fast enough to get there quickly, we burn too much gas to get there (that long a haul) at all! About seven hours later, with just over two gallons of gas in our tanks, we pulled in to the old marina where we planned to stay for the night. Alan had to request an inner space away from the gas dock. I walked up the rickety wood ramp to the ship store to register while Alan was tying us into our dock space. There were two guys ahead of me who had just pulled in with the very large motorboats and one said to me while eyeing the store, "There's a tornado watch and this place won't be good to come in to get out of its way...it's too shaky and has a lot of glass." So although we weren't out on the water, the weather was still a concern.

The short of the long of it is that the storm hit just as Alan and I both went below. And it poured for hours, steadily, some thunder, a lot of wind but no tornadoes. The boat got pushed around a bit but we hunkered down, sipped soup for dinner and were cozy.
News is that FL got hit harder with heavy storms and tornadoes.

And this morning as we were untying the same man came over to Alan and asked if he and his friend could follow us out into Hell's Gate, a narrow shallow part of the waterway. We draw less water than they do (about 3 1/2 feet to their 5 feet) and they were concerned about running aground. Alan, after reading our depth gauge, kept reassuring them over the VHF radio, "Depth is 10 feet...oh, we dropped to seven but holding there."

We are the babies on the water (the Dream On is a 26 foot trailerable MacGregor sailboat with a 50 hp engine)...one of the smallest traversing the ICW -- mostly a comfort issue
Funny part was -- the electronic navigational systems of the two large boats following us probably cost more than our boat does!