Dawho River, Alligator Creek

652 nm   N32 33.770   W080 24.594

Up early to leave Charleston and hit Elliot Cut with a reasonable current.  Elliot Cut is a short, narrow canal south of Charleston.  The reversing tidal current rips through there at several knots, making your passage either a high-speed sleighride at 8 knots, or a slow crawl at 2 knots!  We were hitting it with a slight current in our favor.

Shortly before you get there, there is a drawbridge, which will open on request.  Just before we got to the drawbridge, we heard a tug (pushing a barge) announce that he was entering Elliot Cut Northbound.  You can't pass a barge in there, so you have to wait.  The bridge tender also wanted to wait for the tug to get to the bridge, so he could do one opening and handle us both together.  So we ended up waiting a half an hour for the tug to arrive.

Tug with Barge at Drawbridge

Once through, the run down Elliot Cut was uneventful.  The current continued to build in our favor, untill the GPS reported our speed-over-ground as 8 knots!

Doin 8 Knots on the Edisto River

Our destination today was an anchorage on the Dawho River.  Using a chart, I had picked out a spot with suitably shallow water on an "Oxbow" on the Dawho river.  An Oxbow is a little loop off the main river that rejoins it, leaving a small island in the middle.  This oxbow was charted to almost 6 ft of water at low tide.  The tides here are enormous compared to what we're used to in the Cheaspeake.  Up to 8 feet!  Thus, 6 ft at low tide becomes 14 ft at high tide, requiring MUCH more anchor line to get a proper scope.

But whe we got there, at low tide, the entire Oxbow was silted up, high and dry with NO water!  So now we had to look for another place to anchor for the night.  Joan took the helm and continued on slowly, while I consulted charts, Skipper Bob's list of anchorages, and Active Captain for suggestions. 

Finally, a number of miles further on, I found a listing for "Alligator Creek".  The anchorage was in the mouth of the Creek, off of a wide spot in the ICW.  So off we went.

When we got there, we discovered that Alligator Crek was also all silted up at low tide, even though it was supposed to have 7 ft of water.  But the anchorage in front of it was fine, and we dropped the hook there.

For the first time on this trip, we were immediately assaulted by thousands of gnats, along with a helping of no-see-ums and mosquitos.  We retreated below and shut all the hatches, ending the trip with our usual end-of-voyage drink and toast:

"To another successful voyage. Nothing broke, nobody got hurt, and we ended with the same number of people as we started!"

Life is good.