Up at dawn, breakfast of scrambled cheesy eggs and tea. Head up a creek to the closest fuel dock and fill the tank and jerry cans, I leave the dock at 8:30 am and head for the ICW, just mindlessly following the rivers, at around noon I see a bridge ahead of me and it looks low, I know that most of the bridges in GA and SC on the ICW are 65 footers, but this doesn’t look like one of those. I look at the chart and it says, it is a fixed (non-opening) I95 bridge, wait a minute… I’ve never gone anywhere near I95 while taking the ICW route before, where in the hell am I now? Well apparently, I needed another good night’s sleep, I got turned around leaving the fuel dock and I took the Turtle River (looks like the ICW on the charts, but isn’t) through downtown Brunswick, completely going the wrong way… it’s going to take me another 2 ½ hours to get back to the fuel dock and make the correct turn heading north. Oh goody. By 2:30 pm I’m making the turn up the ICW I should have at 8:30 am this morning, not going to be a good day no matter what.
So, with my actual day starting at 2:30 in the afternoon, I’m hoping that nothing slows my northern progress down. The hours and miles tick by and I notice north of me a line of black clouds, I know that they are thunderstorms, but it looks like they will pass me by without taking any precautions. As I’m twisting and turning through the rivers and creeks of Georgia, the line of storms seems to be continually staying right ahead of me no matter where I turn. But I know that’s silly, they can’t change direction to follow someone, right? Well… in about an hour, it becomes fairly obvious that I’m going to get it right in the teeth, the sky continues to darken, the winds pick up, it isn’t too bad and I think that the worst has passed me by, but no, there are forces at work here that I know nothing about, I’m on the Altamaha River and the storm changes direction (my hand to God) and hits me again, this time all hell breaks loose, I’m getting 4-foot swells, inland, this isn’t anything like normal, I’m using full motor power and I have to tack from side to side across each swell to make any headway at all, I’m doing 1 ½ knots (1 ¾ miles per hour), this goes on and on and on, the storm seems to stall right over the top of me. I realize that I’m not moving forward and barely keeping from losing ground. I drop anchor, if this is going to be a stalemate, I’m not wasting fuel doing it. I button up and go below, I’m soaked to the core, and this goes on for 10 more minutes, I’m anchored and hobby-horsing like I’m out in the Atlantic. The storm disappears, the sun comes out, and there is nothing to make you think that the weather Gods had frowned on you. I raise the anchor and head north again, by 8:30 pm with dusk only about 15 minutes away I find a place to anchor in a no-name creek, in no-where Georgia, with not a city or town or house light to be seen from any angle (remember the Twilight Zone reference from before, Ya, that again).
I’m asking myself what are the chances? Seriously the real chances, that this happens as a series of unrelated, non-connected, random events. I’m saying Hummm… again.