Steve
Sitting here in Beaufort South Carolina (there's a Calhoun Street here too) with its 9ft tide I thought I would like to give my views on tidal current.
We were stuck in a creek for a couple of hours which is irritating but all you have to do is wait for the tide to flood and away you go. The current is more interesting. A one and a half knot current seems to trump a 13 knot wind when anchored. The boat will point into the current rather than point into the wind and waves. It's like sitting at a intersection and having the bus beside you roll backwards. You jam on the brakes and your stomach does flip flops because you think you're moving forward, but you're not. Same thing when you are at anchor. In this situation you look down into the water and you can't convince your self you're not moving. Then when the wind cranks up to 15 or 18 knots, it starts to over power the current and now you are side ways to the wind and all the landmarks (you used to get a fix on your location) are all in the wrong place. This is when you are thankful that you have GPS tracking. The tracking component of the Chart plotter or GPS is the only visual to convince me that we indeed are not moving.
While anchored in Charleston the current had a big affect on the position of the boat, even though we were anchored behind an island that would protect us from the northerlies (this was during the effect of the hurricane Ida - and they were calling gale force north winds). By-the-way, when you see an" island" on the charts - don't go imagining a large clump of white pine on a rock face. In these parts of the country it is invariably a clump of grass at high tide and a pile of mud with a grass crew cut at low tide. We anchored in a narrow part of a creek flowing east / west; so we anchored Bermudian style - one anchor to the east, one to the west. This is instead of one anchor having to reset each time the flow of current changed with the tide. We thought we were done however, when we poked our head out to have a look around at slack tide (that's the time at the top of high-tide or the bottom of low-tide and there is no current), we found that we were being blown into some guy's boat to the south of us by the north winds. Needless to say, the north winds were in effect when there was no the current and pushed us to the south. . . we set a third anchor for the wind.
Back in Beaufort we have no wind and a large open anchorage so we have only one anchor out as the tide switches all the boats in the anchorage take slow lazy shift and end up pointing the opposite direction. This dance occurs every 6 hours.