Another gorgeous sunny day, around 15C but it felt much warmer as we were going downwind. When we finally arrived in Thunderbolt GA ( near Savannah ), Lynn took out her Willie Nelson CD ( yes we still use those ) and played "Georgia on my Mind". Felt great to arrive in a new state.

Today we watched this fishing boat heading towards us off our starboard side. All of a sudden the captain stopped and scooped something out of the water with this long handled net. Instantly two pelicans approached him and we realized he was pulling in a crab pot. He tossed out what looked like a small fish towards the eager birds and proceeded to add his worthy catch to a live well. By this time other hungry pelicans had arrived to see if there was anything for them. Amazing. Unfortunately the 1st mate is having difficulty operating the camera on my phone so we hope you can picture in your mind what we saw.

It was another day of watching out for shoaling areas. One tricky one was "Fields cut" which is a canal built by the US Army Corps of Engineers connecting the Wright and Savannah rivers. We encountered some large dredging barges on this canal. We expected some shoaling, but because we were passing through this area on a rising tide, we had no problem. Also the dredging equipment had probably already cleared any issues we might have had even at low tide.

We are now at Thunderbolt Marine. There are some BIG boats here. I tried to take a picture of one docked not too far away from FBG and had to take 2 pictures and still couldn't get it all in. The white one in the pics below is 198 ft in length. We were told by the marina manager that the blue one that Lynn is in front of costs $80M and costs $8M to $16M a year to operate. The guy that owns it is 90 years old and apparently owns some big horse racing tracks in the US and uses this boat for personal use only. That's how the 1% ers live.

more lovely homes along the water

This is what happens after a canal on the ICW is dredged. They have to take the sand and mud that they removed and put it somewhere. Here they are taking sand off the barge and dumping it neatly on shore. Other areas that had been done are now green, providing a barrier for flooding and it looks great.

Having the traditional "Arrival beer"

Big big boats