This morning, we were heading for Georgetown. On the way south, we ran the ocean for this leg of the trip.  We would have liked to have done that again, but for our northbound trip, the winds and seas weren’t favorable (seas on the ocean 3-4 ft), we could wait a day for more favorable weather however, Robert’s autopilot wasn’t working so he would prefer not to hand steer the ocean.

While we were at the dock in Charleston, we spoke to another boater last night and he was waiting for a weather window to go outside to the ocean rather than run the ICW.  Hmmm… The ICW isn’t always the easiest way to go. You’re always on the look out for shoaling and there are plenty of slow (no wake) areas that you have to content with.

Pulling off the dock at about 7:30am, it was windy and choppy across the Charleston Inlet.  About 30 minutes later we came out of Charleston Harbor and crossed into the ICW and the chop was a little better but the wind was still kicking, added to that we had to watch for shoaling since we were only about 2 hours into a rising tide, and the wind was pushing the tide out. 

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It was just too windy to steer from the upper helm, so John and I had to move down into the lower pilot house due to the wind.

We were going to anchor at Georgetown for the night, but decided to run a little further north into the Waccamaw River and find an anchorage for the evening.  We found a nice little place just west of Butler Island, north of Georgetown.  The winds finally settled as we reached our anchorage at Butler Island.

What a peaceful anchorage, looking forward to a quiet evening. Tomorrow is another hectic day as we try to run to Southport and finally reach North Carolina.

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