Adventures of Boreas: Day 277 – New Teakettle Creek to anchorage at Birthday Creek

Continuing to mind the tides, we depart at 8:00am with the goal of being anchored in Birthday Creek around noon. The weather is clear and there are very light winds. The scenery looks basically the same as we’ve seen all through Georgia – a huge salt marsh. Making the effort to travel when the tide is up has been the right thing to do. Even in the places where the guidebooks say the water is shallow or shoaling has occurred have been plenty deep for us, but we do comment that we would not want to be in some of these spots during low tide.

We get anchored in Birthday Creek by noon. This creek is a bit narrower than where we were yesterday so we decide to put out a stern anchor so that we don’t swing and get in trouble on one of the banks when the tide changes. Frank launches his dinghy from Once Around and he and Fred get both stern anchors set. Then we relax and watch the boat, the tide and the anchors.

As the tide changes and we begin tugging hard on the stern anchor, we realize that with the flow of the incoming tide and the wind (which is in the same direction) that the stern anchor is dragging. We talk to Frank and decide we want to re-do the stern anchor – he again launches his dinghy and he and Fred get the stern anchor re-hooked. We have dinner after the stern anchor is re-set and discuss what will happen when the tide switches again just before midnight. We decide that the stern anchor we have out will probably not be up to the task of holding Boreas and that we will have the same dragging problem again. Instead of trying to deal with a dragging anchor in the middle of the night, we decide to get out our storm anchor (a Fortress FX37 with 50 feet of chain) and deploy that and then bring in the other stern anchor.

We figure we can do this ourselves since there isn’t really any load on the stern anchor – we’re just going to take out one anchor and deploy the other. The challenge becomes managing the 50 feet of chain and the 300 feet of anchor rode that are part of our storm anchor system. After much grumbling (and a few words that aren’t appropriate to put in the blog), the storm anchor, its chain and some of the rode are in the dinghy with Fred. The rest of the rode is on the swim platform of Boreas with me. The launch of the storm anchor and the retrieval of the first stern anchor go well. Fred arrives back at the swim platform with the original stern anchor in the dinghy. We discover that although he tried to wash the anchor off before bringing it into the dinghy a large glob of mud is now resting on the floor of the dinghy. Rinsing with salt water is our only option, but we believe that if we can just scoop the mud up with something flat, we will get most of it out without making a mess. The only thing we can think of for scooping is the pancake spatula, so I go to the galley and get it. It is the perfect tool for the job and the mud is out of the dinghy in no time.

We head for bed and Fred sets the alarm so he can check the anchors as the tide changes. His checks are uneventful and the storm anchor does a great job, holding us perfectly through the next tide change.

Miles: 31.4 Bridges: 0 Locks: 0