The Savannah River served as the city's economic spine for two and a half centuries, its wharves handling eighty percent of Georgia's cotton exports by 1860. Merchants built ballast-stone warehouses along Factor's Walk, their cast-iron bridges spanning the bluff between River Street and Bay Street forty feet above.
Today those same warehouses frame the departure point for narrated harbor tours, where paddle-wheel riverboats retrace the channels that once carried indigo, rice, and naval stores to transatlantic markets.
Savannah River cruise tickets provide access to five vessel types operating from the River Street terminal. The harbor sightseeing option traces a ninety-minute loop past Fort Jackson's brick ramparts, the Eugenie container terminal where post-Panamax cranes load vessels bound for Rotterdam and Singapore, and the Tybee Roads anchorage where incoming ships await harbor pilots. Naturalist guides identify osprey nests on channel markers and explain the Corps of Engineers' forty-seven-foot dredging project that allows fourteen-thousand-TEU container ships to reach the Savannah port complex. Sunset departures time their return to coincide with the golden hour light striking the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist's twin spires across the historic district skyline.
The lunch and dinner cruises add white-tablecloth service and live Lowcountry jazz ensembles to the maritime narrative. Menus feature she-crab soup, shrimp and grits, and pecan-crusted grouper sourced from Thunderbolt fishing docks six miles downriver. Evening voyages pass beneath the Talmadge Memorial Bridge's twin cable-stayed spans, their lit towers reflecting in the tidal current that reverses four times daily. Combination packages pair riverboat passage with Old Town Trolley narration, creating a three-hour land-and-water loop through Forsyth Park, Bonaventure Cemetery, and the Factor's Walk mercantile corridor. All departures operate from the original 1887 wharf pilings, their yellowheart timbers still visible at low tide beneath the modern concrete dock.
1 hr 30 min
