Looking at the charts before the trip I had planned to hang a left out of the canal, cut in front of the pier, then around where that shipwreck marker is at the mouth turn to the SE towards Ochlockonee Shoal. A couple of guys I talked to at the ramp though said it was safer to head straight out, through the channel markers and then follow those out to open water, which seemed sensible enough so that's what I did. Turns out though that even following the channel markers pretty precisely (or so I thought?) there were all sorts of areas that were sounding the alarm on my machine at 2-3ft. I ended up doing about 7kts the whole way and backtracking a lot as I was terrified of running aground. What's the deal out there? I don't have access to my plotter at the moment, but this is about what I think the course we ended up on was (The RED is where I think we went with the PURPLE box being the general area where we got lots of shallow water warnings <2ft. The GREEN is where I originally wanted to go before being advised not to):
We only got a little ways beyond those last two channel markers on the map because we were headed directly into about 3ft seas and it was miserably wet and cold with all of the cloud cover. All of the marine forecast sites I looked at (BouyWeather, Windy, WindFinder, NOOA) agreed that it was supposed to be 1ft seas in the morning dying down to 0ft in the afternoon... and it wasn't very windy, defnitely seemed like less than 10kts. After looking at the satellite images again I notice that whole network of bars extends pretty far out, I was wondering if that exaggerates the waves out by those last channel markers? That if I had kept going it would have settled down some? Ultimately this was very disappointing to me because the wind and seas forecast looked about perfect to me, but the experience was not pleasant. I want to be out S of the 24 bouy to find water and bottom for spearfishing but with the way things were on Saturday it seems like I would need absolutely 0 wind in the forecast to do that, based on the experience with those swells.
