Enough Georgia already

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any; also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measure; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient. If you shall find that he had not intended any offense, come out frankly and confess yourself in the wrong when you struck him; acknowledge it like a man, and say you didn't mean to. -Mark Twain, Advice to Youth speech, 15 May 1882

Two days in Kilkenny Creek was one day too many. Eager to head north again, Felix and the ubiquitous band of horse flies motored out of the creek just as the tide started to flow in. With lots of anchorage choices along the way, we left without any set destination. Early in the morning we motored through Hell Gate, which had been another of the dangerously shallow spots, except that they finally started dredging the cut and in fact the dredge was still in operation in the middle of the channel. The only excitement was when Captain Retard on a sailboat, who I kindly won't mention the name of, decided that passing through a shallow, narrow cut named Hell Gate with a dredge rig in operation in the middle would be the perfect time to try and motor past Felix. And of course, with the dredge in the middle, the idiot decided to pass between us and the dredge, forcing us out of the remaining bit of channel while waving cluelessly at us. Mind you, this is all happening in slow motion as we're travelling at 5 mph and he's moving about 5.5 mph. There's about 40 feet of channel left but unmarked and unclear in it's location, and two 15' wide boats passing side by side. Since I was more willing to play bumper boats than run hard aground, I angled Felix's bow towards the side of the moron's hull while explaining to him at the top of my lungs what I thought of his seamanship. I think he got the message when he started to turn to starboard and almost ran into the dredge pipe, and we both barely sneaked through.

The clouds were gathering again in the early afternoon, and the radar showed rain all around us, but we decided to push on past Thunderbolt and clear the Causton Bluff bridge because it's restricted in the mornings and we wanted to be moving early the next day. For the sheer irony, we decided to anchor in St. Augustine Creek which flows parallel and right next to the Savannah River. It seemed so out of place from the deck of our sailboat to be watching the humongous container ships plying back and forth along the mighty Savannah. The creek itself was strange and interesting, with deep water, 25-40', right up to the edge of both it's banks. To say that anchoring was a little tricky is an understatement. With water that deep, you need to put a lot of chain out, but in a narrow creek you need to be careful about swinging into it's sides. Bands of rain and clouds passed through all afternoon and into the evening, which along with the strong current and surprising amount of boat traffic through the creek, made for some very restless sleep in the evening. Our vicious guard dog finally came to life in the evening when he spied a crabpot float about 20 feet from the boat and started barking like it was a cat! We had to distract him from the scary float with a traditional southern meal of grilled ham, green beans with potatoes & vidalia onions, and homemade corn bread muffins.