South Carolina Rivers

We are on the road again, now with our daughters during their college winter break. It took a whole month, but we finally received a new, uber strong, deluxe edition of the parts we were waiting for (the alternator brackets, in case you have not been following the world news).

Since we arrived in Charleston on Thanksgiving day, it seemed only appropriate to depart on Christmas day. And so we did. On Christmas morning we left what we affectionately called the wailing dock. There was the Quebecois in a monohull that had to be towed after the propeller fell off. Then the Texan couple who hit a reportedly unidentified object at high speed in the middle of the night, with considerable damage to their catamaran’s crossbeam. The marks that such unidentified object left were the same red hue as the navigation buoys’, though. Next on the dock was Ñandú, with an engine out of commission due to a cracked bracket. Then another catamaran, which got pinned against the corner of the slip’s finger when arriving because the skipper didn’t take the current into account. The unpinning maneuver left an ugly and long dent in its otherwise pristine port hull. Further down, a sailboat that hit its motorboat neighbor while docking.

We got back to the Intracoastal Waterway, which in this region follows a maze of rivers and land cuts that connect one river to the next. In just two days we tasted the waters of the Cooper, Ashley, Stono, Wadmalaw, Dawho, South Edisto, Ashepoo, Coosaw, and Beaufort Rivers. That’s about twice as many rivers as I had previously sailed in my entire life.

The usual ICW concerns apply here: narrow waterways, changing shoal areas, large tidal range, potentially strong currents, recreational and commercial boat traffic, and a couple of bridges with barely enough clearance or complicated opening schedules. We survived them all with reasonable composure and decorum, and reached the old town of Beaufort, South Carolina (not to confuse with our North Carolina stop, spelled the same but pronounced differently: BOW-fort for the northern town versus BEW-fort for the southern one).

There was, however, one last obstacle before touchdown. To reach the marina we had to leave the ICW to enter Factory Creek, right before a swing bridge. With the sight of a shoreline ominously dotted with all sorts of shipwrecks, we listened to the dockmaster instructions on the radio: “Enter the channel between the green marker and the bridge. The area around the marker is very shallow, so you have to be as close to the bridge as possible, without getting sucked into it. (And by the way, all those wrecked boats you see are the ones that left without paying)”. Great. Too close to the marker and we’ll run aground, too close to the bridge and we’ll get sucked in, without any indication of how close is too close. Keeping an eye on each of my enemies and another on my ally the depth sounder display (yep, that makes it three eyes), I cautiously entered the channel. The sounder showed the depths getting shallower at an alarming rate, but I was already uncomfortably close to the bridge. Luckily the depth started to increase before I had time to think, react, or panic, and it was a deep channel from there to the marina. The guys that came in a day later, however, didn’t succeed with the last part of the instructions and ended up hitting the bridge, pushed by the current. They managed to avoid disaster by staying on the right side of the bridge, but a beam poked a big hole in their hull. Fortunately, it was above the waterline, so they are still afloat, although with a sizable repair job ahead.

From Beaufort we continued along the Beaufort River where we enjoyed some sailing with the speedometer occasionally displaying 12 knots, only to see it drop to a dismal 2.5 knots, engine and all, once we turned upwind and against the current of yet another river, the Chechessee. We didn’t need to go far to find an anchorage in Hilton Head.

On new year’s eve we had a good weather window so we headed out to the ocean with the goal of making in 24 hours the same progress as we would have made in three days on the ICW. That’s because the days are short and we wouldn’t dare being on the waterway at night. (Sorry, Donna, we passed St. Simons Island offshore and at night). The new year was received by a dark, moonless night, calm seas, smooth sailing and no champagne. Kathy and Ada enjoyed some fireworks during their shift, but they didn’t bother waking me up, even though I told them to!

In the morning, when the seas were turning slightly bumpy, we came back inshore through St. Mary’s River, which separates Georgia from Florida. We headed North for two miles to anchor by the beautiful Cumberland Island. More about Cumberland Island National Seashore soon.