Misadventures - Issue 6

Adventures (and Misadventures) of Elliott and Mary

Issue 6 - May 24, 2004

Up the East Coast to the End of the Atlantic ICWW…

We left you, dear reader, poised to journey into the Georgia lowlands. We went there. We also motored through the South Carolina and North Carolina coastal waterways. For technical reasons I will not talk about, you will have to close your eyes and imagine many of the sights we saw. :(

I will provide you with some 'chartlets' to give you a spatial reference.

We rendezvoused with friends Ted and Helen Brown and their Albin 43, Act II, off Drum Point behind Cumberland Island, Ga. after leaving St. Augustine. We were to travel together all the way to Portsmouth, Va over the next 15 days, a travel opportunitywe will long remember and look forward to doing again.

Thank you Ted and Helen for sharing so much and so willingly of your experience over the last year.

The anchorage was in a long tongue of water with the trees of Cumberland Island to the east and shoals which became visible at low tide and then salt grass to the west. A really pretty place. The marsh and salt grass is simply so peaceful and gentle.

We anchored the next two nights also. The first up the Frederica River off the Fort Frededica National Park. This was an early colonial military outpost (the British against Spanish!!). We dingy-ed over to the park and watched a brief movie staring John Ireland (when he had full brown hair). The tides all along this stretch have a total swing of 6-8 feet and if we had been 10 minutes later getting away we would had a 3-4 hour wait until enough water came back to unstick our dingy.

Buckhead Creek was up a winding creek with salt grass banks. As we will experience for many days, the current flows associated with the tide reverse four times a day with substantial currents.

The next two stops were marinas.

Thunderbolt, GA is just below Savannah. We needed to stop and get a prescription filled at the local Eckerds. We rode our bikes into town and the nicest pharmacist did all the coordination between the Slidell doctor's office, the Slidell Eckerds, and her parmacy in Thunderbolt. That could have been a disasterousexperience butshe made it possible for us at Thunderbolt.

If you will look again at the chart, you can see that the Atlantic is just right there. It flows in and out those inlets with dependable regularity and real force. This became really obvious at our next stop.

We stopped at the Beaufort (pronounced Bew-fort), SC city dock for a pumpout and a night ashore. We borrowed the courtesy car for a trip to town for groceries and a look around. We were docked at one end of the City dock on the river side. The current sweeping past the long 'face' dock (one you tie alongside of) was something else!!

Parts of town were right along the river and we unpacked the bicycles for a tour. I am sorry I don't have the pictures of the town. The neighborhood was impressive, moss hung oaks shading equally impressive 1800's homes. I wondered how Sherman missed them.

Let me point you to the chart again. The ICW in this stretch of the Georgia/SC lowlands winds up creeks and then through short cuts to the next creek where it goes down to a river and then down to a Sound and back up a river and then across ... You get the picture. Sometimes the current gives you a push, sometimes the opposite. Part of the trick is that you don't want to be going the wrong way in small narrow passages. That's where the current really gets fierce. In part this attention to current flow determined our stop in Church Creek south of Charleston. We choose to go past the city for this trip and wanted to get across Charleston harbor while the tide was slack.

We went into Georgetown SC for two nights and a little R&R. This was also a mail stop. Georgetown reminded me of New England - southern style. There were many, many houses dating from the late 1700's to early 1800's, all being currently lived in and cared for. The town wasn't large and whether the steel mill would open again was big news but we want to visit again by car sometime.

Picture this!
Its 'Bike Week' in Myrtle Beach, Barefoot Landing is a BIG shopping mall which hosts biker vendor and display areas, and part of the facilities includes a LONG, FREE dock on the ICW. Actually, the free dock and the mall outweighed the biker attraction in our determination to stop for the night. It was a sight.

We had been worrying about the next leg for the past week. One of the inlets, Lockwood Folly, has been reported to have silted in and at various times reportedly closed the ICW as a result. Since the tide there is 4.5 feet (and we draw 4-4.5) we didn't foresee particular problems as long as we could find the channel but high tide only occurs twice a day and there were scheduling challanges. There is a pontoon bridge about two hours earlier in the journey (it floats on a barge in the water - the only one left on the ICW) that only opens on the hour and, reportedly, not at all at low tide . We had to make the bridge at the right time.

However, we made it through, thanks to a bigger boat that had been forced back and, while waiting for more water, was helping direct boats as to the proper course. I do have to give a negative assist to a little fisherman who insisted on fishing at the exact spot I need to get to for the next turn.

We will leave you for now with us safe and securely docked at the St. James Plantation Marina just short of Cape Fear. We have traversed the shoals and need to be at the right place at the right time for the tide on the river as it flows up toward Wilmington, NC.

We will have about a week left to go before Portsmouth with a couple of hard days ahead. We have two more days of coastal waters to do and then we head north across the Neuse River, the Albemarle Sound, and through the Dismal Swamp.

That will be issue #7.

Will be back in to touch soon.

The Captain and Mary

May 24, 2004

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	We rendezvoused with friends Ted and Helen Brown and their Albin 43, Act II, off Drum Point behind Cumberland Island, Ga. after leaving St. Augustine. We were to travel together all the way to Portsmouth, Va over the next 15 days, a travel opportunitywe will long remember and look forward to doing again. Thank you Ted and Helen for sharing so much and so willingly of your experience over the last year. The anchorage was in a long tongue of water with the trees of Cumberland Island to the east and shoals which became visible at low tide and then salt grass to the west. A really pretty place. The marsh and salt grass is simply so peaceful and gentle.
We anchored the next two nights also. The first up the Frederica River off the Fort Frededica National Park. This was an early colonial military outpost (the British against Spanish!!). We dingy-ed over to the park and watched a brief movie staring John Ireland (when he had full brown hair). The tides all along this stretch have a total swing of 6-8 feet and if we had been 10 minutes later getting away we would had a 3-4 hour wait until enough water came back to unstick our dingy. Buckhead Creek was up a winding creek with salt grass banks. As we will experience for many days, the current flows associated with the tide reverse four times a day with substantial currents.