This was a week of Firsts!  

First First:  Saturday afternoon we launched our dingy, and took it out for about a 4 mile run- the FIRST time we’d gone so far.  Absolutely beautiful.  

Second First: Sunday was the FIRST time we’ve had guests on board!  Two nice couples we met at their nice little church, Steven and Diana, Chuck and Connie, accepted our dinner invitation, and we had a great time. Diana made some “Redneck Caviar” – our FIRST time to experience this delight!  Look it up, it’s real!

Third First: Monday we put our cool folding bikes in the dingy and took them about 10 miles to Jekyll Island.  FIRST time to try that, and it worked fabulously!  

There were supposed to be bike trails all over the island, but from where we docked our dingy, the first bike trail looked impassible!

We found the main trail not too far away, and the rest of them were great – including a nice long boardwalk. 

We enjoyed looking at all the birds – and then saw a bird in a tree.  We’ve seen birds camouflaged to look like part of a tree, so here is a tree trying to look like a bird.

Jekyll Island has a very interesting past, but the most famous part is that in the late 1800’s, a bunch of the wealthiest dudes in the country bought it and formed a private club of the island.  Many of them built “Cottages” to stay in for a few months every year.  Some who didn’t want to do that bought into what is believed to be the FIRST condo in this country.  The FIRST transcontinental phone calls were made from this island.  Here are a few of the “Cottages”.

I took some pictures of the beautiful bridge as we sped back to the boat.

Fourth First: This one isn’t so cool… when we came back to our boat, we found our wonderful davit (crane) that lets us move our little boats from the boat deck to the water and back, had for the FIRST time, leaked oil all over the deck!  Ouch!  It seemed to do it only when retracting the boom extension, so we were safe to continue on… but what a mess!

Tuesday we ran outside the ICW to Savannah.  We put in at a dock right in the center of old downtown… We walked along the riverfront shops that evening.  I figured we’d be in the perfect position to explore historic Savannah, which we were.  But Wednesday I woke up with a lousy cold and did no exploring whatsoever.  But it was fun to watch some of the really huge freighters come by – seemingly very close!  In the stateroom I could tell when they were coming by the sound of the props reverberating in the hull like sonar!  When I thought they were so close to us, and in the middle of the river, then another one chugged by in the opposite direction!  Amazing.  So here is a short video of two ships passing, (Very sped up video), one ship so lightly loaded her prop was 1/3 out of the water!  It is real time so you can see how the big single prop turns so slowly and still has the power to move that huge freighter.  Then a short (Slightly sped up) view of a touristy fake sternwheeler.

 

Thursday we talked to the helpful folks at Thunderbolt Marine, just the other side of Savannah.  They said they could start work on our davit as soon as we could get there, so we moved to their terrific shipyard.  They looked at our davit, and said we’d have to remove the whole boom and take it apart in the shop.  They suspected the top seal was failing, and would have to be ordered from Taiwan and replaced.  They expected about 5 days total, maybe less.  Sigh.  So Friday morning they brought a huge crane to lift part of our crane off our boat. 

Once in the shop,  they found what I’d been praying for… a loose fitting!  Seals were OK, lines were OK, but a fitting way inside the boom, at the very end, had come loose!  So they redid it so that wouldn’t likely happen again, and reinstalled it – all in ONE day!  So fabulous! 

The area called Thunderbolt supposedly got its name when a huge lightning bolt hit and created a spring.  So we got to see how that looked!  We were about to move to the marina side instead of the working side, but delayed because the weather started looking really ominous.  And it came on fast!  VERY heavy rain, and VERY dramatic lightning!  One crack looked like it was right on the dock, and the thunder was instantaneous!  I’m convinced the building next to us was hit and didn’t burn down because of the torrential rain.  OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it sure felt like it!  I am going to look for new springs in the morning!  After the storm passed we felt more like having dinner than moving, so we will stay put here for now.  The calm after the storm is always beautiful too!