Day 11: Hilton Head, SC to Darien River, GA

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Before we left Annapolis, I adamantly stated to Ann that I will not take the ICW in South Carolina or Georgia. I heard and read too many horror stories about the shallow trouble spots there, and while the ocean can be uncomfortable, it is so much easier than dealing with other boats, shallow areas, logs, barges, bridges, wakes, etc. 

So, today we cruised in the ICW in South Carolina and Georgia. 

And it was spectacular. 

What changed? The ocean is rough and will be bad all week, and we are not prepared to delay our arrival in Stuart by a week. Also, Ann and I spent significant time studying the tide charts and the route, and we determined that with proper planning, this was doable and safe. Not only that, this particular stretch of ICW was special. We saw dolphins all day, and the landscape (waterscape?) was stunning. 

We had an exact departure time to time the tides, and it was raining when we pulled off the dock. The upside of the weather was that a dolphin photobombed my rainbow pic.

Within a couple of hours, the sky cleared up. We passed several no-wake zones with houses along the water and their docks protruding hundreds of feet into the channel. The one below must have been around 1,000 feet.

There were two significant trouble spots today. We hit them both with over 5 feet of tide. Still, we both breathed easier when we passed through Hell Gate. The name alone was enough to keep us on edge. Here's a screen shot from Aquamaps showing our boat at the bottom after navigating through.
We passed several boats, and some overtook us, but for the most part it was an easy and uneventful run of 76.5 nautical miles. The currents gave us an extra push most of the day, and we averaged between 10 and 11 knots at 1150 RPMs. We usually run around 9.5 knots at that level.
We anchored in the Darien River, just a mile off the ICW, and right before another trouble spot called Little Mud River, as low tide approached. High tide is at 10:16 a.m. tomorrow, and at 9:00 a.m. we'll have 4.5 feet already on a rising tide. So we plan to pull up anchor at 8:30 and get going on the rising tide. We have two more trouble spots tomorrow, and we believe we've timed them properly, so we expect and hope that we'll have a similar day to today, but a couple of hours shorter.

Here are a few pictures around the boat that I took after setting the anchor and settling in.



Now that we are safe and secure, we settled in to watch the election results. Now THIS is scarier than low tides!

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