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| Jake |
Then, we got lucky enough to find a "Patriots' Bar" and got to see the Pats defeat the Broncos - YAY!! (Condolences to our Colorado family - well, maybe).
We left the docks in Charleston on Monday at noon and got back on the Waterway. The sites remain fascinating. The currents remain strong and the anchorages remain quiet. The moon is coming on to full.
For those of you who are not sailors, or have never done the ICW, we thought it might be interesting to see how all of this works. Southbound on the ICW is "red right returning" which means that you keep any red marks to your right, as if returning from an ocean voyage. You wind your way through cuts and rivers and creeks following these marks, as well as your chart. We use an electric chart plotter which is like a GPS in your car. It shows where your boat is in relation to everything around you and the boat moves along the chart as you go.
The person at the helm is constantly scanning ahead, looking for marks, checking the chart plotter with a constant eye on the depth sounder (showing how much water is under your keel). Today, we passed through the Ashepoo Coosaw Cut and saw 0.5 on the depth sounder! Yes - that means 6 inches! We're used to several feet. The transponder that runs our depth sounder is mounted on the bottom of the keel - so it means we had only six inches of water below our keel and you can believe that we were creeping along! Occasionally you can't trust what the chart plotter says regarding depth or position. Sometimes, our little boat is pictured over land! Government charts change slowly!
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| Keep these to your right in the ICW going South |
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| Keep these to your left in the ICW going South |
If you should happen to get confused, we were told to look for the little yellow squares or triangles on these markers and use those instead - ha! They are kind of tough to see at any distance.
Much of the time it feels like you are creeping down an alley. Then a large power boat comes up behind and you are supposed to slow down so that he can give you a "slow pass," to prevent his wake from pushing you around. All kinds of things to learn along the way. We took a "Secrets of the ICW" workshop at the Annapolis Boat Show and we are very happy that we did. We learned all these interesting tidbits that would have taken us the whole trip to figure out on our own.
Tonight we are anchored just inside Skull Creek on the north end of Hilton Head Island. We arrived just before sun down, saw a beautiful sunset, and had a simple dinner. We're looking forward to exploring the island on our bikes tomorrow.
