When I began to plot our trip off-shore from Charleston to the Cape Fear River Inlet, the National Weather Service had been predicting that the winds, which had been from the N/E and quite strong, would moderate and shift to the west. This would have been ideal conditions for this trip.

Naturally, as the departure time approached, they began to back off of this prediction. Now they were predicting much stronger winds and higher waves that would probably develop when we were well off-shore. Furthermore, the winds that they were predicting would have been right in our faces which could have made for a bumpy, wet and miserable ride.

As Jo and I left the Charleston City Marina a little before sunrise on Saturday the 17th of April, the conditions were perfect. Clear, warm and light to moderate winds out of the N/W. We still could have gone off-shore and just hoped that the benign condtitions would continue in spite of the forecast but an old maxim kept popping into the skipper's head. "The sea floor is littered with the bones of optimists."

We decided to stay inside and head back north on the ICW. As it turns out, its a good thing we did. As promised, the winds did build and eventually shifted back to the NNE which would have put them right on our nose.

A positive feature of staying on the inside was that we got to travel through what I think is one of the prettiest parts of the ICW, the Wacamaw River between Gerogetown and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Our first day, we had good winds most of the day and were able to motor-sail at about 7 knots. We made the 65 mile trip to Georgetown in good time and arrived at Harbor Walk Marina at about 4:00 PM.

On Sunday, we travelled up the Wacamaw River to Myrtle Beach. Along the way we saw lots of wildlife including dozens of turtles sunning themselves on logs. This area is very remote and the tree line of the surrounding forrests and cypress swamps come right down into the water.

After spending the night at Osprey Marina, we continued north to our first anchorage, on Calabash Creek inside the Little River Inlet. When we first arrived and dropped the anchor, there was only one other boat there. Within an hour or so, we were joined by 4 other boats.

This is a nice area to anchor but it has a lot of swift tidal current. Unfortunately, at this particular time of day, the brisk winds and current were opposing each other. This caused the boats to lay sort of haphazardly on their anchors. Consequently, we reset our anchor twice before we were satisfied with our spot and settled in for the night.