Life on the Intercoastal Waterway
current location:  "Wally's Leg" near Brunswick, GA

For the past week we've been meandering our way down the ICW.  None of it's new to us, as our first year we took the waterway all the way to Fort Lauderdale, and several sections we have seen many times from both directions.  But we've been off the boat for two years, so I feel as though we've been taking a refresher course in the ICW, refamiliarizing ourselves with the rhythms of the waterway.

It's a whole different way of looking at the world, traveling along rivers and dredged canals at about 7 mph.  Certainly it's analogous to the highway system, with routes you can find on a map, and signs with shapes and colors that indicate their meaning, and even rules of the road - but of course they're all a little different from the highway versions.

The range of cars, SUVs and pickup trucks are represented by a variety of pleasure craft, sail and power.  Instead of semis hauling trailers, we have tugs pushing barges.  We even have our equivalent of the straight-pipe Harley: the cigarette boat, which is long and skinny and really really LOUD.  And every once in a while we see a few bicyclists - that is, kayakers.

The analogy isn't perfect.  I don't know what the equivalent of going aground would be in a car (and maybe I don't WANT to know!) And hee, I was about to write that we haven't gone aground yet, but as I was typing this paragraph, Britt slowed way down, so I put the computer down - I'm sitting below, typing, while he takes a shift at the helm - and went up to see what was going on.  "Six feet and dropping," he said, so I checked the chart and told him we were too far to the right.  Immediately he turned left, but before we got to deeper water we saw depths under five feet. Normally that would put us aground, but as we are motorsailing - motor's on and the main's half out to help push us along - we are heeled a bit, so I guess that kept us off the bottom.  (Or maybe it was just very soft mud!)  It's dead high tide, nearly six feet above datum, so at low we would have been on dry land - good thing we didn't ground!

Another difference is that when you're driving down the road, you don't have to radio the bridge ahead to ask it to let you through.  Of course, when you're in a car, most of the time you get to cross the bridges right away, but sometimes they make you wait for a stupid sailboat.  :-)

Sometimes bridges are a welcome distraction in a dull day, sometimes they are annoyances.  Leaving Charleston, we hustled to make the 9 am opening of the Wappoo Creek bridge, which only opens every half hour, and not at all during rush hours; with a favorable current, we arrived at the bridge right on time, and when we radioed the bridgetender, she said, "Two minutes." 

That sounded good, because the current that had helped us make the opening was now trying to push us into the bridge.  It's a lot easier to stall into the current than with the current, but I figured, two minutes, I'd just wiggle around and wait.  So we wiggled and waited.  And waited.  There was a big break in traffic, and we expected the gates to come down...but they didn't, and more traffic crossed.  Another break.  And then more cars.  Meanwhile we were being swept uncomfortably close to the bridge, so I turned the wheel and hit the throttle, turning away from the bridge in a big circle - and of course, when we were pointed upstream and away from the bridge, the bridgetender decided to FINALLY open the damn bridge.  Ten minutes after her promised "two minutes."  Grr.

On the other hand, the tender at the Ladies Island Bridge at Beaufort called us before we called him, telling us that we should just come on up and he'd open right away because he had a boat waiting on the other side, and they were lined up on the east channel so we should take the west channel.  And "have a nice day."  And he smiled and waved from the control booth.

It seems to me that the bridgetending world seems to consist mostly of young black women who favor the vehicles, and old white men who favor the boats.  I guess my preference will change when I'm in a car rather than in my boat, of course.

Away from the inlets and the cities, there really isn't much traffic, because it's still early for most of the snowbirds.  Still, we do see a small but steady stream of yachts going north; we're pretty much the only southbound vessel out there.  (Other than Wings, who apparently passed us while we were doing chores in Charleston and are about a day ahead of us.)

The scenery has slowly changed from the cypress swamps of South Carolina to the grassy swamps of Georgia.  That is, in the unpopulated places.  In the populated parts - well, if you were a visitor to the US seeing this country for the first time from a boat on the ICW, you'd think everyone was fabulously wealthy.  The houses on the waterway are huge and fancy mansions, with long docks ending in gazebos and floating docks, sometimes boat lifts.  We stare at how the other half lives as we go by...and then the waterway bends, and we're back in the swamp.

Which is where we are now, anchored in a tidal creek called "Wally's Leg."  (And don't forget that http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/winlink.cgi?KG4EYP will get you our most recent location, whether or not we've updated this log.  And actually, I'm updating this log using the cellphone modem before doing the location update on the radio email, so wait a few minutes before trying it!)  It looks like the middle of nowhere, but the strong signal on the cellphone reminds us that although civilization might not be evident from here, it's not very far away.

Anyway, we've had enough of poking down the ICW.  The weather's looking good for a jump outside, so the plan is to exit the waterway at St. Simon's Sound near Brunswick and head for somewhere in Florida. It's two days to West Palm Beach, a good way to make some miles in a hurry. See you then.
- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/26/2007 [link]