The Seventh Voyage of the
Chick-a-Dees
Segment 05, Day 2 – Tuesday, 05/11/2021
CT Segment 05 St. George Island SP to Carrabelle Marina
This day dawned gray and foggy with low-hanging clouds but low winds. No thunderstorms predicted until the late afternoon so we were out the door early. We dropped Dena’s car and trailer at the Marine St. boat ramp in Carrabelle on our way over to St George Island and by 8:45 am we were paddling away from the state park Youth Camp launch. Not bad considering you can’t enter the state park until 8 am and we were not the first in line today.
Rather than thread thru the oyster bars again we kept south of Goose Island and paddled straight across the cove to Gap Point. The state park maintains 3 primitive campsites on the sandy point for paddle-in and walk-in tent campers. The beach looks welcoming at both high and low tide and the individual campsites are indicated by a picnic table just inside the tree line. With the beach and trees the campsites look like they are protected from wind coming from all directions. We had originally planned to tent camp here until the weather turned against us this week.
We paddled along the shoreline of Gap Point and out into the St George Sound. We followed the island coastline, staying about half way between the marked shipping channel and the shore so we had 8-10 feet of water under our hulls. The clouds got lower and lower and at times visibility dropped so much we actually seemed to be paddling in the clouds. I remember watching one dark cloud bank approaching until we were right under it. Sometimes we could see the buoys marking the shipping channel about 500 feet to our left and sometimes we couldn’t. It was eerie, but in a soothing, cocooned sort of way.
We reached the end of St George Island around 11 am and crossed the channel to Dog Island. In the channel to the Gulf the seas kicked up to a moderate chop that hit us broadside, but it only took us half an hour to get across to where we were again protected from the southwest wind by the island. Dog Island is private and reachable only by boat. There used to be an 8-room lodge on the island called The Pelican Inn for overnight visitors but it closed in 2014 and was destroyed by Hurricane Michael in 2018. There are about 100 residents and a good portion of the land is now owned by The Nature Conservancy. You can catch a water-taxi in Carrabelle and spend the day on the beaches, but there are no facilities – restrooms, water, food, etc. – for day trippers.
From Dog Island we struck northeast back across the St George Sound towards the mainland, basically pointing our noses at the white beach of Carrabelle Point and staying west of the boat channel. The plan was to take a nose-on-the-beach break at Carrabelle Point which the CT guide book lists as a primitive campsite and where we had planned to tent camp before the weather turned nasty. The property is owned by the state of Florida, so at least it’s probably a legal campsite, but no facilities. It would also be a very exposed campsite since state ownership does not include the woods behind the beach, so your tent would be exposed to winds from the east, south and west. A restroom and potable water is available at Carrabelle Beach Park about 1/2 a mile to the west. The point is best approached near the shore from either the east or the west since sand bars extend straight out to the south from the point. With the tide going out the water was getting really shallow over those sand bars so we turned more to the east without stopping, heading towards the entrance to the Carrabelle River.
From the water the entrance to the Carrabelle River is somewhat hidden and the buoys curve way to the east and come back again to the entrance. In our kayaks, of course, we didn’t need the buoys marking the deeper channel and just followed the coast until we could see the channel markers leading up the river about 12:30 pm.
We entered the river and paddled slowly up the river to the west of the fairly busy channel. On our previous trip to Carrabelle we had put in at the Moorings Marina near the US 98 bridge, so that’s where we headed even though we were taking out at the Marine St boat ramp. In fact, there are several boat ramps in Carrabelle. Three private marina ramps (fee) but worth considering if you have to leave your car there overnight. Plus 3 free public boat ramps. Both the Marine St. PBR on the east side of the river and the Timber Island PBR on the west side of the river have good parking and launch facilities. The Carrabelle City PBR needs some repair work done, so I don’t recommend it at this time.
We paddled slowly up the river admiring the yachts and working boats moored and docked along the way.
Just before we arrived at The Moorings Marina it started to rain. Not hard, just enough for us to dig out our rain hats (we already had our skirts on). We hit the boat ramp where we had launched on our previous trip at 1:25, took a couple of pics then turned around and headed back downstream to our car. By 2:30 we were loaded up and on our way back to our B&B.
We showered and changed clothes while the rain thundered down then drove down to Eastpoint where we ate dinner around 4:30 pm at the Family Coastal Restaurant – the only place open on a Tuesday night. After shrimp and grouper the rain was over although it was still cloudy and we drove out to St. George Island State Park to retrieve my truck. We were back in Carrabelle by 7:30 so we stopped by their River Walk area looking for sunset pics but the low clouds only gave us a hit of pink in the sky. By 9 pm we were in bed, preparing for our last day on the water. 15.7 miles for the day and we stayed safe to play again tomorrow.
