Video Transcript

(0:00) After a few nights on the free dock in Jacksonville, Florida, it was time to head north towards Cumberland Island and our first new state on the Great Loop, Georgia.

(0:08) But we made a rookie mistake leaving the dock and since others might be able to learn from it I figured I’d show it to you here and kind of talk about what happened.

(0:20) Now we did pre-talk about our plan which was to take off the spring lines, then the stern, then the bow line. The spring line is still on. How are we gonna get that off? 

(0:57) I was able to get the swim platform close enough so at least to get off the boat untie the one spring line that was left on accidentally and then get back on the boat, but obviously it was kind of a weird tricky scenario. 

(1:10) Luckily, there was no one behind us and we had time to leave in the dock at slack tide. 

(1:28) Once we got away from the dock and everything was good, we took a few minutes to talk to each other about what happened. 

(1:33) Elyse apologized again for leaving the line on and I apologized for not being more clear with my words once I kind of got a little flustered and we also told each other, hey, look, we’re new at this at this point. This was like our fifth time docking the boat, ever. 

(1:47) So we just reminded each other. Hey, we’re new at this. We’ll get better at it. 

(2:47) Good morning from the Great Loop, welcome aboard Swamp Puppy, I’m captain Tom and today we had to leave the dock because of tides. 

(3:30) So what are tides tides are a change in the water level that happens about every six hours. 

(3:35) You get two high tides a day and two low tides a day, and depending on where you are the tidal change can be just a few inches so it doesn’t affect you too much, to somewhere like Georgia where we’re heading today where it could be as much as eight feet. That’s crazy! 

(3:49) Today, we’ll be crossing into our first state by boat, Georgia. 

(3:52) Now Elyse and I have traveled to almost all 50 states via a camper van or some type of car travel, except for Alaska. This is our first state that will be visiting via boat, pretty cool. 

(4:19) But the tide is low and the water level is as low as it’s going to be it exposes all kinds of things lots more land. 

(4:26) Here in Florida you get a lot of sandbars, so a lot of people will go out and hang out in the sandbars and you can walk around on them. 

(4:32) We’re heading to Cumberland Island today and there are lots of spots where if we were going through a low tide, we wouldn’t be able to make it because the water level is too low.

(4:43) The opposite of a low tide is a high tide and that’s where the water is at peak level. 

(4:50) If you’re somewhere like the Bay of Fundy, where we went last summer in the camper van, they have tidal changes that are over 50 feet difference. 50 feet the water changes. 

(5:01) Insane, in fact Bay of Fundy has some of the largest tidal changes in the world. That’s near Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. 

(5:07) Tides change every six-ish hours. So you have two high tides and two low tides every day.

(5:12) Sorry, we’re going through some shoaling. So I’m having to really pay attention here.  

(7:30) There’s also the state of tide that’s called slack tide. That’s near when the tide is at its highest and it’s about to reverse. It’s been going up it hits the peak and it’s going back down that like 30 minutes when it’s at its peak or the same at low tide the 30 minutes around when it’s at the lowest point. 

(7:47) Typically you have the water not moving a whole lot. So it’s relatively slack and that’s known as slack tide. 

(7:54) Now it’s nice to know about slack tide because sometimes getting on and off of a dock can be tricky or setting an anchor or things like that going into a marina different places depending on where they’re located they’ll have a lot of current flowing through them because of a tidal change. 

(8:10) For example this morning. We were getting off the dock at Sisters in Jacksonville and the tidal current can really rip through there. I mean there was literally waves behind our boat yesterday evening. 

(8:20) So if we left during the wrong time period it’d be a little sketchy getting on and off the dock. It’d be a lot more challenging. 

(8:27) So what we did was we timed our period leaving this morning closer to slack tide and we also timed a rising tide because we knew we were going to be going through some low areas today.

(8:40) There’s some shoaling and basically lots of places that you can run aground. So we left just after low tide on a rising tide close to slack, so we didn’t have a hard time getting off the dock and plus once we got past the inlet we actually have a little push. 

(8:57) You know the current of the incoming tide the rising tide is helping us and the tide will be getting higher as we get closer to Cumberland Island where all those low points are. So we planned our movements today around the tide. 

(9:13) We’re two hours in and we’ve traveled 15 nautical miles so far. 

(9:18) We’re currently fighting a little bit of current heading to Fernandina Beach, so we’re down to 7.3 miles per hour. 

(9:23) Things are going good. It’s beautiful. It smells like smoke. Elyse took a look and there’s a wildfire burning nearby. Other than that, it’s a really beautiful day. 

(9:35) It’s hot and then cold, mainly cold.But when that sun gets out from behind the cloud, it warms up quick. 

(9:42) We take off our jackets and it gets behind the cloud and we’re putting the jackets on again. We even got some hot tea. 

(9:48) But beautiful day not too much longer and we’ll be out of Florida. 

(9:52) The tidal current is ripping through here. If you look near the post you can really see the current like on the back side of the post. 

(9:59) You can see the water moving, you can look at the water and kind of see which direction is going. 

(10:05) The current created by the tide coming in or out of a location, especially somewhere at bottlenecks like a bridge is something that is pretty cool to feel when you’re driving the boat. It will try to push you around, so you really got to put your bow into the current and you might have to give a little more throttle than normal to get through that bottleneck because all the current is flowing and as it gets to that smaller space, it’s increasing in velocity and you’re fighting that. 

(10:31) So if you’re in a boat that goes real slow and you can only go say four or five knots, you really got to pay attention to going past bridges because if the current is flowing too fast, you might not actually be able to physically fight it enough to go through it.

(11:59) It’s a boat graveyard through here so many boats that have run aground. Crazy all these sailboats ran around because they didn’t pay attention to the tides – just kidding, obviously. 

(13:20) Tides are something that boaters really have to pay attention to, it’s not just a high tide and a low tide. 

(13:24) The tides also change, you know by where the moon is in its phase and then also where the sun is relationship to the earth. 

(13:31) So the tides are constantly changing and something that boaters have to pay attention to, especially when you’re going through somewhere like north Florida or Georgia, because Georgia has the largest tidal swings in the lower 48.

(13:43) We’re crossing into Georgia in three, two, two, one we’re in Georgia! 

(13:56) It’s our first state by boat, how cool is that? 

(14:00) We decided to have some oranges because Florida, and take a little bit of Florida with us into Georgia and celebrate by having a nice delicious cold orange.

(14:27) After three hours and 45 minutes of cruising, covering 25 nautical miles, we approached Cumberland Island and thought to ourselves: “Wow, we’ve actually cruised this boat from Key Largo, where we bought it, all the way through Florida. 

(14:39) So the entire east side ICW. It was pretty cool to have that feeling that we boated an entire state. 

(14:45) As we arrived near our planned anchorage in Cumberland Island, a pod of dolphins came out which was just a magical way to end the day. It was so cool. 

(14:56) It was still early in the day because we arrived around 10:40 a.m, so we dropped the dinghy and headed over to shore and did a lot of hiking. This video is getting a little long, so I’m gonna put the hiking portion into another video. It won’t be a cruisinng video, but it will be checking out Cumberland Island.

(15:12) So make sure you’d be on the lookout for that one. 

(15:14) Hopefully you’re subscribed if you’re not please subscribe and make sure you ring the bell that way you’ll actually see when our video gets posted. You won’t miss one an episode. We’re filming the entire Great Loop. 

(15:23) We’re doing a video for every single cruise day. This is cruise day number eight, but in real time, we’re 38 cruises in so we’re pretty far north. Can you guess where?