Beaufort SC to Church Creek Anchorage
Today was cold, windy - but not rainy. An ok day to travel. We didn't have many 'out in the open' passes today so most of the time we could do a fuel efficient (relatively) slow roll.
We drove in fairly tight quarters most of the day and some of the channels were particularly tight and shallow. Fortunately we crossed all of them at high tide or just after so that gave us another 5ft of water to clear anything that would be iffy.
You can see the water wasn't smooth - and the wind whipping but the waves were fairly subdued. The wind, unlike the past week, switched to come from the land side rather than the water side.
And there were sections fairly protected without much for wind or waves. The tides, however, affect speed drastically. When the boat says it's going 12mph the actual speed over ground varies from 6.6 to 14. Often when the tide was giving me 2+mph I would cut back the throttle to 8 or 10mph and get the 10-12 it gave me for free....
We would then go faster upstream with the throttle to decrease the time we were traveling upstream therefore improving mileage dramatically.
At this point we aren't in a hurry to get anywhere. We need to be in Charleston on Saturday and we are about 20 miles away already....
If all goes well we will do a short trip tomorrow into Charleston harbor and anchor overnight so that the next day we only have to cross the river to check in at our marina where Aaron and Bailey will be coming to visit! We are so excited to have visitors again! Going up the east coast we haven't had people we know - at least very often. That's about to change for a few weeks.
We have also, in SC come back into crab pot central. In Georgia they were rare. Here they are everywhere and we see boats out hauling in their crabs all the time. It's easy to tell the crab boats as they always have pelicans tailing them from ball to ball. Apparently there are things thrown out (not crabs) that the pelicans go for immediately. They are like vultures around crab and fishing boats.
We also passed another American Cruise Lines river cruise boat today. We see them at lots of ports here. This one is really nice, very similar to the ones we have been on in Europe.
We've driven past a number of casinos on our trip (they are often on riverboats) but this is the first one we've seen on dry dock.
This facility must work on big boats because they also had some small military vessels in their docks.
We've arrived at our anchorage. A fellow looper is anchored about 300ft away so we will both swing back and forth in the wind and current overnight as the 5-6ft of tide comes back in (lifting us and pushing us upstream) and then goes back out (dropping us and pulling us downstream). The wind will cause us to go back and forth and make us a bit dizzy as well ... It really swings us unless the current is strong.
And of course we had to position ourselves just so - so that we wouldn't hit crab pots when the wind and tide spins us...
You can see some of their buoys floating in this shot. It's also evident how difficult it is to see them. Sometimes they make them dark blue or black which literally blends into the water. I don't even like the white ones because white caps look just like them ....
48.5 miles today... Pretty much all in slow motion.... When it looks like we are moving faster in the chart - we are - because tide is pushing us toward the ocean.
PPS. The wind died , the water got flat, the tide switches directions, the loons came out and are calling and the dolphins are feeding around the boat occasionally coming up and blowing air out their holes by the boat. And the sunset is AMAZING. This IS the life. It doesn't get much better than this in March....
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