We left Charleston Monday morning with a number of other southbound cruisers, all waiting for the first opening of the drawbridge, at 9:00am. I had to manipulate the boat for about twenty minutes while we waited for the opening. At least the current was against us this time. That’s better than pushing us towards the bridge. We all hung together for a while once we went through but then we started to spread out. The wind was good so we put our jib sail up to help move the boat as we motored south. Somehow we ended up in front of the group of sailboats we were with.

We were lucky to have high tides and good currents most of the way yesterday but when we got to the cutoff between two rivers, in the late afternoon, Bill read in his cruising guide that the cutoff had recently been surveyed to have only four feet of water at low tide. Unfortunately it was low tide, and our boat draws five feet. Time to anchor. We were the first of the boats to drop our anchor on Upper Rock Creek. One of the boats that was nearby only draws four feet so they went through and reported back to us that, in some places, there truly was only four feet of water in the cutoff. We had made a good decision.

This morning when we left we were almost the last boat again. No problem, we weren’t going too far today. We are now anchored in Beaufort (pronounced Byoofort). Above is a picture of Moonraker waiting for the opening of the Lady’s Island Swing Bridge. The city of Beaufort is right past the bridge. Only one other boat came through the opening with us.

We’ve decided we are going to go offshore for the next leg of our journey. We are going to skip the Georgia portion of the ICW. That means going out to the Atlantic Ocean from the Beaufort Inlet and staying about ten miles off the coast until we get to the inlet at Fernandina Beach, Florida. This should take about twenty four hours, but should save us a couple of days.