Is everything floating in Savannah? Good question! When you go down to the riverfront notice the pilings, docks, and boats in the river. When you return a little later, you will notice something has changed but you're not sure what. Take a closer look and you will see that the boats/ships are now much higher (or lower) and that the docks have also risen (or sunk). This is our tidal fluctuation and it is always happening, much more so than other places you may have visited along a waterfront. Savannah is a coastal city and the Savannah River runs just 14 more miles and "empties" into the sea, right next to our closest barrier island, Tybee Island. What sets up even stranger conditions is that the Savannah River is running parallel to this shelf's depth (E-W direction) and dredged to a controlled depth of 42 feet to allow for the draft of large ships into our port. Because of the sun and moon's gravitational pull on our oceans, the "normal" tidal fluctuation along the eastern seaboard is roughly 2-3 feet and is not that noticeable at many locations farther north and south of us. However Savannah is unusual because it is in the middle of the "Georgia Bight". The Georgia Bight is a part of the continental shelf and is so termed because of how wide it is and how deep into the United States (westward speaking) this shelf is looped or carved into. This "bight" (derived from a loop of rope wrapped around an obstacle to obtain better friction) or carving out (in a bird's eye view of the U.S. continent) where shallow water can flow, makes the normal tides 2 to 3 times LARGER than normal because the tidal wavelength is flowing for such a long distance over a shallow shelf. It's like putting water in a cookie pan and not spilling it before you are able to get it to the sink! The wave doubles and triples on itself while it travels this longer distance into our continent. With the river dredged 3 miles upstream for our port authority, 14 miles downstream to get to the open ocean, and then another 5 miles out into the ocean (just in order to get to an average sea bed of 42 feet or more), this unusually large 8 foot average tide (coming in and going out twice per day) is quite remarkable. You can easily see the overall height of the water makes it's own impression. And the small height differential for the bottom of the sea/river combines with the distance this volume of water has to travel (over this very wide shelf), making a time period that can be up to 2-3 hours different for "slack" tide (no movement-high tide or low tide condition), dependent on how far from the edge of the continental shelf you are. During the incoming tide (flooding), that volume of water is so strong, it pushes up against the fresh water coming down the Savannah River, creating a salt wedge which tries to go under the fresh water. If you are up the Savannah River, that east-west distance to the edge of the shelf becomes even more pronounced, and you get even more of a time differential for high tide at various locations.  Of course, it also means that boats cannot be moored (tied up) to fixed objects or pilings for very long. You might think you have time to tie up to an old piling, left from some long ago period, because you have sensed that the water has not been moving much for the past few minutes (slack tide?), but with that much water having to come in or go out in a little over 6 hours, it doesn't take long at all before your lines are straining because the deck has just dropped or raised a foot! Everything must be designed to float on the pilings so that accidents do not occur. Docks are designed to float, ramps for people or cargo must float (at least at one end!), and even markers or floats for crab traps must have enough line on them to allow flotation/indication on the highest of tides ("spring" tides). This tidal fluctuation is what sets up one of Mother Nature's most lush and beautiful nursery grounds on the planet, for the plants and animals that grow here.

From Blue to Green? Yep, the way in which the continents broke apart left the "then unheard of" City of Savannah very far into the United States eastern seaboard. This is not to say there isn't land out there to our east, it's just saying that the land to our east is mostly underwater at this time in history. In other words, our continental shelf which goes slowly sloping out into the sea, goes wwwwaaay out into the sea, about 60 miles offshore, before it drops off to a sea bed of hundreds and thousands of feet deep.  OK, while you're trying to grasp the whole tidal picture, and contemplating the ideas of why the tide creeps in on us, hits our long shallow shelf and as the bottom gets shallower, creates this very high and low tide condition, think about this. What might grow in areas where seawater is flooding over everything low-lying for 6+ hours (remember the heights of anything only have to be in the 8 foot range to get submerged) and then rushing back to sea and evacuating everything it covered in that 8 feet height for the following 6+ hours. That's what I'm all about. Studying and simply explaining how this interaction between living things and the sea has taken place for all these many thousands of years, and what it means to us. Green water instead of blue? I'll bet it has alot more to do with growth, than with any of mankinds pollutants. Come take a Coastal Journey and find out! You'll learn a bit ....but mostly, you'll just have fun!

Ever wonder how these wading birds catch fish by the basketload? Try it yourself sometime at the beach and you'll get an idea just what good eyesight and how fast you need to be. These guys cheat a little. They have a lens in their eye that corrects for the bending (or refraction) of light as it moves from air to water. Snap! The Great Blue can be on top of it's prey in milliseconds.

Alligators in the water? No, not really. The tidal rivers that we usually go into are too salty for alligators to thrive. They need the fresh water like some of the pools that form on some of the more remote barrier islands in order to survive. However, if it's alligators you want to see, we can venture up the Savannah River and into the Savannah Wildlife Refuge, where the salinity drops a bit and it's not too tough to find a few sunning on a log or embankment!