Day 15 - Charleston, NC to Hilton Head, NC
Today we were underway by 7:00 because we wanted to do a long offshore run to Florida. That didn’t exactly happen. We headed offshore. The weather called for 2 ft seas with 7 seconds apart. That was so not true! We started off out of Charleston. It was a SW wind that was hitting us on the beam again. We started out pounding into them. Every third wave we would drop out of the wave and slam. We lasted 20 miles and realized we had seven more hours of this type of travel. Doug said at least the spray was just shooting over the hard top and not hitting the windows this time. The hard part is that most of the inlets in that area are not able to get us back into the ICW safely. After an hour and fifteen minutes we turned around and headed back to Charleston. We were not alone. There was a yacht much larger than us and they turned around as well. Once we made the turn back it was a much more comfortable ride. While our early morning detour slowed us down it was much more comfortable in the ICW. We were worried about a couple of areas where these is severe shoaling. Our detour delayed us enough that we actually hit the shoaling spot at high tide.
Coming out of one river we noted a submerged metal light in the channel area. There were two boats approaching the inlet so we let them know. We learned later that the light we saw was actually attached to a buoy. It seems a barge must have hit it and dragged it to that point according to a Coast Guard report.
We saw so many dolphin again yesterday just playing lazily. We again saw a ton of birds and a sea turtle. We thought the ride would be slow going but we actually got up on plane most of the way. The route was windy and it seems liked we were going the wrong way many times but we just followed the channels. We pulled into Harbor Town in Hilton Head. We actually visited here the year I was pregnant with Emily. We saw the infamous lighthouse. They are expanding restaurants there now so it was quite a construction site. We fueled up and moved to our slip. We had a hard time getting shore power hooked up. It appears one of our new power cords doesn’t work. Luckily we had a spare. It was 80 degrees and super hot at the marina. We got the power hooked up and turned on the air conditioning. We showered and then walked over to the shops and restaurants. We got an ice cream and sat in the shade in our rockers. We fit right in with all the retirees sitting there. We ate at the restaurant onsite. It was a crab shack type restaurant and the food was very good. We headed back to the boat to cool off and I wanted to post some blogs. The wi-fi was again horrible. I got one blog posted and lost another. The blog drama continues.
Today we traveled 141 miles (40 was out detour). It took us just over 7 hours. Tomorrow we are planning to go to Brunswick, GA. We will leave a little later to make sure we hit some questionable spots at high tide which is almost 11 AM.