Enter South Carolina

Five more minutes...

Get UP!

It's morning!

Ok, OK!  I'm UP!

Time to get back on the road...

I need my beauty sleep people!

Time and tides wait for no cat...

We wake up.
We have coffee.
We contemplate the rising sun.
We check the tide chart...

We pull the anchor and and motor towards the channel markers and the Sound.  It still amazes me that it's so easy to get underway.

Bruce works on tidying things up as I take us back out through the mouth of Walburg Creek and follow the navigational aids out of St. Catherine's Sound.  The waves are up from yesterday's high winds causing a rolly ride for us today.

Poor Jezabelle tried to stay on deck for as long as she could.  She crawled from her position on the aft deck into the cockpit, tossed her cookies and settled on the settee next to me for a while.

When we got to the end of the channel and made our turn to the North, we started to raise sails and that's when she gave up and went below.

Raising the sails usually settles things out a bit on confused seas, and today was no different.  Bruce spent most of this short Coastal hop tweaking and changing things out in an attempt to gain speed and keep us comfortable.

The winds were not much over 10 knots but were dead behind us, which is our worst point of sail...  Even though light, the seas remained rolly all the way to the Tybee Roads Inlet

We settled in and relaxed for a few hours of critter watch, but saw nothing today.  We have lots of time for reflection on these easy offshore days.  There are plenty of things I could be doing... blogging, journaling, reading my Kindle, but for some reason, I don't.  We either chat about some mundane thing, or just sit and stare out to the horizon in companionable silence as the minutes and hours tick away.  Sail adjustments and minor course adjustments are the only entertainment needed on days like today.  It's just beautiful out here...

The skies clouded and it became hazy as we neared the Tybee Roads Inlet and began the work of dropping the sails.  Why don't we leave them up you might ask?  Well, I'm very cautious and nervous about entering unfamiliar inlets.  I read everything I can find about entering and although we have reasonably good weather for it, I still enjoy the control of entering under motor with the sails down.  Once we experience an inlet, I can totally leave under sail, but for our first time in, we are cautious.

Coming into the dredged channel through the shifting shoals, we see that there is a ship standing just offshore.  A pilot boat races past us as we move over to the Red side to make plenty of room for commercial traffic.  Our AIS, which has been relatively silent, sounds the alarm...

I'm not going to play chicken with this big boy!  Bruce begins to freak out a little as I edge further over to the red side.  We have a little bit of outgoing tidal current as we have arrived earlier than anticipated and the tide has yet to turn.  But we're making way fast enough for us to get outside of the channel just as it makes a turn to Port... we're going to Starboard.

The ship seems to be racing up on us and Bruce cautions me to get out of the way... It looks as if it's going to run right over the top of us and I assure him that the ship will turn before it makes mincemeat of us...  By this time, we are just outside of the channel.  At seemingly the last possible moment, the behemoth makes a neat turn and passes us by as we slowly motor away...

Don't go outside of the channel...  Ya THINK???

But WHY are we out of the channel and motoring away?  We're being adventurous, that's why...  The Tybee Roads inlet has nothing for us... It leads to the Savannah River, which is treacherous, busy and has no good anchorages.  But there is another sound just to the North... Calibogue Sound.  (I love saying that word... Calibogue, Calibogue, Calibogue)  Coming in at high tide, we were confident that we would have no problem getting through the shifting shoals between Tybee Roads and Calibogue...

Sure, I was a little nervous, but we proceeded slowly and followed the instructions I could find, consulted all of the resources at hand, and then plotted our course.

We watched the depths and never saw anything less than 10 ft.  Luxurious depths after our days in the ICW back in the Florida Keys...

Harbour Town light.  A familiar landmark.

The waters calmed and began to get deeper.  Suddenly we were seeing 30 feet, 40 feet... 50 FEET!  We had made it!  We passed over the bar and were in the Sound.  We began to see weekend boaters out frolicking and having fun.  There were parasailers and fishermen... We even saw one boat pulling in a shark that looked to be about three feet in length.  WOW!

Entrance to Bull Creek

There were sailboats sailing around in the narrow strip of the Sound.  Bruce wanted to put the sails back up but we were literally twenty nine minutes to our anchorage...  So, we motored through the sound and made our turn into the Cooper River for a short way, then turned into Bull Creek to pick our spot.

Wide open marsh to our East and West

What looks to be a narrow strip of water on the chart, turned out to be a wide open and deep waterway.  We rode the incoming tide into this deep creek... marveling.  Back home, a creek was about three inches deep...  This is the Mother-of-all-Creeks!  The depths were plentiful, over 20 ft. in many places.  We wanted to be out of the center so we picked the Eastern shore to begin looking for our spot.





N32°09.613', W080°51.089'

The Bend

The current was deceptively swift running beneath the water's surface.  I learned this as I made the turn to come upwind so that Bruce could drop the anchor.  We were swept up the creek quickly and I had to motor back to find my spot again...   We checked the depths close to shore.  We found no less than 15 ft. about 20 feet from the shore so I felt confident in our position... we dropped anchor far East of the channel and before the bend...

We were set for the night.  Even though there were winds in the 12-15 knot range by this time, the water was smooth and flat, with the exception of the wakes thrown by passing motor boaters.  But it was Saturday night and they would be going home soon...

A tour boat brought a group of people out to see the sunset.  They took pictures of us, while we took pictures of them!

Neither they, nor we were disappointed by the sunset tonight...

Bruce and I took our seats with our sundowners and waited for the show.  There was one casualty... my drink was spilled by the wake of a passing speedboat...  Oh well, I'm sure he had somewhere important to be...

I got another drink, cleaned up the spill and was back in position well before the main event.

Please enjoy this sunset with me... I couldn't choose just one...

It was just awesome and the pictures do NOT do it justice.  The tall trees on the islands in the distance provided the perfect frame for the magnificent change from orange to fiery red...

After the final sizzle, we waved goodbye to the tour boat and watched a pod of dolphin roll by... We enjoyed the quiet of the anchorage as the boaters all disappeared, leaving only the sound of birds as they found their beds.  What a beautiful surprise this anchorage turned out to be.

We were excited by our newfound adventurous streak in having braved the shoals while entering Calibogue Sound.  We searched our brains to come up with anything we might know about this new State we had entered... South Carolina.  Nothing.  What does this State hold for us?  We shall see...  Bring it on South Carolina!

In the morning, we woke early and checked the tides...  It would be good to get going early.  The currents would not be our friend today as we would cross inlets that would play havoc with our ability to make speedy forward motion.

We pulled up the anchor and got underway, this time we would stay inside.  We travel today towards Beaufort, SC.

We are undecided as to what we will do or how long we will stay at this point... But for now, our forays into the Atlantic are done... and Jezabelle is a happy South Carolina Cat...