Thursday, April 3, 2014 Best Laid Plans....

Our first obstacle of the day is the Ladies Island Swing Bridge.  It is closed from 7-9 am.  So, we wanted to make the 9 am opening so we could make it to the Ashpoo-Coosaw Cut by 11 am.  If we leave our Port Royal Landing dock at 8:15 or a little earlier, we can just drift the 3.5 miles up to the bridge.  Everything is going as planned.  We have this timed to a T.  Then I hail the bridge tender to request the 9 opening when he came back at me and said there is wreck, of all places, on the swing section of the  bridge!   What?  He's hoping for a 9:30 am opening.  In the mean time  the line of traffic is growing!!   Oh well, the best laid plans....Well,  we finally got called by the bridge tender saying that the 3 car accident is cleared off the bridge and he'll open at 9:30.  He wouldn't even cut us a break and open early...oh well, such is life!  And the bridge opened at exactly 9:30 am.

Yikes!  Passes port to port in a wider area.

I just hope the bridge delay isn't going to mess our plans getting to the Ashpoo-Coosaw Cut at a good time.  Once again we are trying to plan this passage at a safe tide.  Of course, the currents so far are working against us today.  Even with that, we made the cut by noon and high tide in this location is 11:56.  I don't know how we did it.  Once through, we continued on our way, fighting the current and not making very good time!  We flew our jib most of the day but the only time we made good progress was going through the Watts Cut and out into the Wadmalaw River...strange names.  We continued 51.7 miles to the Church Creek Anchorage.  We couldn't stay at a marina even if we wanted to. There are various stretches of ICW that are either all anchorages and no marinas or all marinas and no anchorages.  

When we arrived at the anchorage, there was a moored trawler in this creek and another huge trawler anchored further up this waterway.   The creek is about 350 feet wide so we should be good...but remember with a 7 foot tide, we can see the muddy shoreline encroaching on us at low tide.  While we are sitting in the cockpit relaxing and enjoying the view, a double masted sailboat comes puttering into Church Creek.  Here it's sv/Rabbit Rabbit that was waiting for the swing bridge this morning with us. We also passed them up yesterday morning but apparently they made it to Beaufort anchorage sometime last evening.  We lost them on our way down the Ashpoo  River, but here they are again!