Travelling the ICW

We left Morehead City a few days ago and decided to follow the ICW to Cape Fear.  We are currently anchored in Wrightsville, NC and tomorrow we will stop in Southport.  That puts us south of Cape Fear with a chance to head out to open ocean bound for Savannah, Georgia.  After two days on the ICW, I am ready for some open ocean.

Many of you already have some experience with the "ditch", so this post will not shock or dismay you, but read on if you care to read about a typical experience on this well-used and historic waterway.

Picture this: about 30 boats of various shapes and sizes setting in a 1.5 knot current towards a lift bridge that won't open for about 20 minutes.  The fleet stretches back over a mile from the bridge.  Off to river left, a sailboat is aground with 3 feet of hull showing and being held from falling over by a tow boat until the tide rises.  All the boats still afloat are each facing a different direction and either moving upstream or downstream going either forward or backward.  The channel is only about 200 feet across, probably less.  Spacing between boats is down to feet, and every head on every helmsperson is swiveling like a spastic barn owl.

By some divine intervention, with no loss of life, limb or gelcoat,  the bridge opens and a less-than-orderly procession of boats passes under the bridge.  Downstream, on the other side of the bridge there are a few boats waiting in the river to go upstream.  They are clearly unaware that it is November and the world has tilted to pour boats southward.  To make matters worse, the channel on the other side of the bridge is even narrower because there are marina docks on either side, so now you have boats crossing from one side of the channel to get to the other side.  Let me summarize - 30 boats pouring through a narrow lift bridge, running a dock gauntlet through hovering boats waiting to go upstream.

But it gets worse.  It is approaching low tide, which is why the current is running strong.  Just beyond the marina on port side, about a 100 yards from the bridge is Motts Channel which under normal circumstances takes you to a bay in front of Wrightsville where there is an anchorage.  Under THESE circumstances, however, the water is too shallow so the first sailboat that turns in runs aground and twists across the mouth of the channel.  It was a Catalina 36 from Montreal; he held up his hands at shoulder level and shrugged helplessly as REBOOT and us passed astern with inches to spare.  I had just given a two-whistle blast of my air horn (put one on your boat if you don't have one yet) to indicate to a large power boat that I was going to cut across him and that there was little he or I could do about it.

I was feeling pretty good about dodging the power boat and the shipwreck.  But the good times passed pretty quickly because I was following REBOOT too closely and he abruptly ran out of deep water and did a bat turn about one boat length past the shipwreck - we were sitting in that one boat length.  Again, another miracle occurred because neither of us collided with a) each other b) other boats transiting up and down the channel and c) the ship wreck.  We completed the 180 and followed HOBO II who wisely didn't follow us into hell and continued down the ICW.  As it turned out, about a half mile down, there was another channel that lead to the same anchorage. We took it and here we sit.

Earlier that day, we did see something pretty cool: a kite festival in Wrightsville.  Here is a picture taken from the ICW.

Flying whales and other surreal sea creatures

Branko