We left Buckhead at 0900 to put us at Hell Gate at high tide. Our fellow looper had already left and messaged back that they made it through fine with a 5.5 foot draft. That was comforting. Our hook came up clean and we made out way back to the ICW.

Hell Gate is just a very narrow and shallow channel where the ICW crosses the inlet. Depending on the wind, it can be 3.5 feet deep at low tide. We draw 4.5 feet, so we wanted to give ourselves all the water we could. While narrow, Hell Gate proved to be a non event. We didn’t see less than 7 feet crossing at high tide

We continued to follow the ICW. It is still meanders a lot on this stretch, but it also gets more civilized. This meant several stretches of no wake zones. Even with that, the short distance meant that we were going to get to the marina at noon. With a bit of time to spare, we decided to take the 10 mile detour into downtown Savannah to see if we could get lunch!

The currents on this stretch got pretty strong with the outgoing tide. When we turned up into the Savannah River, we were pushing against a 3-4 mph current. We passed several large cargo ships and could see the gold dome of downtown Savannah. We passed by the cannon of Old Fort Jackson and made our way into town.

Downtown Savannah has a municipal dock that you can tie up to for free, but the reviews were conflicting. It seemed like it might be closed. If it was, our plan was to just head to the marina. When we got to it, we saw some residual yellow caution tape, but the dock looked solid. No other boats were there. The giant paddle boat where they do lunch and dinner river cruises was docked a little further up in the next section of the dock. We moved ahead of it and there was a little room in front of it to dock. We thought about it, but then decided to backtrack and try the first dock. By then another small pleasure boat had docked and we figured we were good to go.

We pulled up into the current, Wendy looped the port bow line on a cleat, and we let the current push us into the dock. I looped the aft line and we tied up. When I looked up I saw that we had quite a few people watching us. I was relieved that this was one of those times where our training and communication made it look easy. We’re actually getting reasonably good at this!

This event was one of my bucket list items. I wanted to take the boat into a city and tie up to just grab lunch. That’s exactly what we did. We had a nice lunch on a balcony where we could see Our Dash. We took a very short walk and went back to the boat to set sail by 2 PM. The marina was only an hour away, but the fuel dock closed at 4 and we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time.

We untied and pulled out into the current without issue. The trip to the marina was FAST. Since we were going with the current, we were going 13.5-14 mph even at a paltry 1100 rpm. Normally that rpm pushes us along at about 9 mph.

We made our way into the marina, fueled up after a short wait, and docked into the current on one of the long finger docks. The dock crew was super friendly and helpful. After scrubbing down the boat, I got a bit of work done and we had a nice dinner. I had a business trip to Manhattan the next day and a 3:30 AM wake up time to catch a 6:25 flight. Back to the real world…