outdoors,  travel

Little Tybee Island Tour with Sundial Charters

June 18, 2021 /

One of the reasons that I like to sometimes find very budget friendly or free lodging when we travel is so that we may enjoy a more expensive excursion that we would usually not budget in. This past weekend, our family had a very short mini vacation in Savannah/Tybee Island and we used the last of our hotel points to book two rooms for two nights. Since we were limited on points, we ended up booking our rooms at the Double Tree by Hilton by the Savannah airport. The rooms were spacious with a little living room area and the complimentary breakfast (for Diamond Members) was perfect to start the day. Yes, it was about 45 minutes from Tybee where we planned to do a few things but the benefits outweighed the inconvenience.

When I planned this trip, I browsed the Tybee Island tourist website and I came accross Sundial Charters which offers a variety of tours. I settled on the little Tybee Island tour because visiting an uninhabited island sounded like something we would all enjoy and was not overly expensive for our family of 6 at around $350.

We met our boat by the river at the Fisherman’s Walk and were met by the captain Renee and her first mate. The youngest 3 boys donned life jackets and we stowed away our water bottles. We made sure to apply sunscreen before boarding. The first thing we saw was a group of dolphins so we stayed in the area for a while admiring them.

The first hour was spent on the boat going through canals and along the shore line. Little Tybee Island is a protected area which can only be accessed by boat. We saw a few birds and many fiddler crabs on the shore as well as oyster shelves.

The boat can travel through the marshland areas and we learned how this area keeps growing and how this island was formed and has grown over the year: the life cycle of an island is quite interesting.

We landed by the dune and Renee left us with our guide to me us later after we traveled the length of the island. Now came the fun part: what kind of treasures would we discover on our walk?

Well, we mostly found dead animals which were all quite fascinating! There were many horseshoe crabs that had washed along the shore line. This was one of the few that was whole.

We did find another intact one with a little bitty one and we learned that the horseshoe crab sometimes molt.

We came accross a couple cannonball jellyfish which do not sting once they are dead.

We found a knobbed welk egg sack: out of each of those rings come out one small sea snail which becomes quite large when fully grown.

We also found one hatched oyster catcher egg, a couple intact sand dollars and the shell of a leopard crab! We really enjoyed finding all of these treasures. Of course we picked a bag full of pretty shells too!

The entire tour lasted about 3 hours with probably a little over an hour spent on the island.

Let’s not forget the couple dead crabs and this weird thing called sea pork: it is called a colony of zooids with a cellulose sack: it was attached to a sun umbrella which our guide collected to dispose on Tybee.

So did we enjoy our adventure? Yes! Would we book with sundial charters again? Yes. They worked with us as our first scheduled time had to be canceled due to storms so we were able to reschedule for the following morning. They were also very knowledgeable and made our adventure educational and fun.

As an aside, parking is not free on Tybee Island and we downloaded an app so we could pay wherever we parked.

A bientôt!

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