Day 67. Southport

Day 67 - Oct. 21

Slept in a bit this morning as we only had a short day ahead of us and we were working around the currents.  We landed in Southport at noon after a 23 nm trip.  At one point I was throttled back to almost nothing and still hit 7.8 kts.  They don't fool around with their currents here and neither will I.  Spent a lot of time checking slack and ebb tides so that we wouldn't have to fight the current too much.  We knew that anchorages would be sparse in this area but remained hopeful right up to seeing the one spot that was available.  We continued a short distance to the Southport Marina to fuel up, get water, and pump out the holding tank.  You should have seen me nudge up to the dock. ( I think I might finally be getting the hang of this....as long as I don't have to fight a current). There were only three dock spaces at the marina, so we decided we better take one while we had the chance.  By the time we went in to pay for the diesel, all the spaces were booked and it is a considerably large marina.  I had to move the boat around to the inside dock and Greg, of little faith, said it was too tight for me to swing around to point my bow out.  Proved him wrong, even with an audience from a neighbouring boat.
We heard there was going to be a weather talk tonight so decided to check it out. We are so glad we went.  Hank, the presenter, showed us the weather for the next five days, explaining the coastal conditions and the ICW.  After that, he explained the problems of navigating the ICW, especially in South Carolina.  The state has not done any dredging in two years as there is no money in the budget.  Surveys have been done and he showed us a dozen places that were less then 4' at mean low tide.  That's not to say you can't make it through on mid to high tide, but it would take a lot of planning to time your high tide travel to hit the areas that have shoaled.  We are strongly considering jumping out and sailing along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. ( apparently Georgia is worse then SC). We have talked to some cruisers who did this trip last year and said even though they scraped a few times, there were no real issues.  I think I would just be worrying the next month that at anytime I would go aground.  I'm warming up to the idea of going coastal and spending a little more time in Florida.  It will mean a few overnight runs, but that's fine as long as we have good weather.
Tomorrow we will stay on the ICW as far as Little River and make our final decision at that time.  Stay tuned!  (We will be out of wifi contact for a while so watch for our In  Reach post.