Saltwater! We made it to Mobile! That’s my first picture of a sunset over saltwater for this trip. We’re staying here at Dog River Marina for a few days. We now have to think about tides and currents here, so things are a little different. Luckily, our GPS has complete local actual and forecast tide information by time and date so it’s easier to plan and understand the effects. (actually, it wasn’t luck, it was planning….that’s one of the reasons I bought this GPS unit). It was great to have the GPS too because we really had to watch our position in the channel at Mobile Bay. The bay is huge, about 25 miles long and 10 miles wide. The main shipping channel is wide and 40 to 50 ft. deep, but we were surprised to find that the depth of the channel that crosses from the main channel to Dog River is only about 6 ft deep at low tide. There are many parts of the bay that are just too shallow to go into. Our paper charts don’t include that part of Mobile Bay, so Kathy was uncomfortable and made me go really slow the whole way. She’s great with charts and navigation and is used to following the paper charts and spotting buoy numbers with binocs to match the charts positions, so without that paper in her hand to look at to confirm the GPS, she’s uncomfortable. This is the only 10 mile stretch out of 6,000 miles for which we do not have paper charts.

Coming as no surprise, we’re not a “big” boat anymore. Here at Dog River there are at least 5 53MY Hatteras like ours plus a large number of much larger boats: 60 ft. SportFish, 70 ft. Hatteras MY, 60 to 80 ft. sailboats……dozens of bigger boats. Of course there are tens of dozens of smaller boats too. Everything you can imagine is here.

I got to update my Great Loop Route map with our red line going all the way to Mobile. Some fun!