Our First Cruise

The miles of marshes Georgia is famous for
can be seen in the distance

Today we took Elixir for her first cruise.  Maybe mini-cruise would be a better term.  We originally wanted to travel to the town of Darien, Georgia, a days cruise from Savannah.  We would stay two nights visiting the town's waterfront and then return.  But before we were to leave, I discovered excess water in the Lazarette.  I knew this meant the drain was plugged, so I jumped down in the Lazarette and cleared the pipe to allow the water to drain into the bilge where it would be pumped overboard.  It drained .... so fast the pipe from the aft bilge to the forward bilge (where the pump is) could not handle the volume of water and so it spilled into the engine pan where there was standing oil (OK - I knew I should have cleaned that up the night before).  So suffice it to say that instead of going to Darien, we had to clean out all the oily water from the bilge.  With inclement weather due in several days, we missed our window for the trip.

Ok, so plan B.  About two hours up the Ogeechee River is a restaurant that can be reached by boat.  I decided we could go there to have lunch.  But after all my meticulous planning to make sure the tides, currents, and times would all match up and then plotting the entire trip into our chart plotter, Marie asked what their hours were.  Leave it to a woman to ask such a silly question.  So I looked it up on their web-site and..... they are only open for dinner!   Who would have thought?   Marie, I guess.

One of the beautiful homes along the Savannah waterfront

Elixir at our condo

Now I had to scramble to come up plan C!  So we decided to take our boat all the way....home.  Sort of.  We have a condo in Savannah to stay at when we are in town.  It is 20 minutes by car from Delegal Creek Marina where we keep Elixir, but up the winding rivers at trawler speed, it was a 3 hour trip.....one way!  So we did what anyone would do when they want to go out on the boat.  We went home and had lunch!

I thought Elixir looked pretty good sitting at the large empty dock belonging to the condo association.  You would think we would keep her there where we could just walk from our condo to the boat anytime we wanted.  But the association says she is too big.  And so the dock just sits empty.  Oh well, we enjoyed the trip anyway and just neglected to tell anyone we tied up there for a couple of hours while we had lunch.

What a life!

After a nice lunch, we cruised back to Delegal Creek Marina where we were greeted by an influx of sailboats and trawlers seeking protection from that storm I talked about earlier.

This was also Abby's first trip on the boat and she took it all in stride.  She found it so relaxing that she spent most of the trip sleeping!  Just like everyone's kids, we kept trying to get her interested in what was going on, but the only time she got excited was when we docked at our condo and a log drifted by.  She was sure it was a sea serpent and would not stop barking at it!

All in all, Elixir's first little cruise was a great success and the start of many to come!