Have been waiting for a weather window to continue outside north from Charleston. Now considering ICW due to wave projections outside. Looking for general comments on ICW condition for that stretch. My power boat draws five feet. Thanks, Joe

The stretch from charleston to Winyah bay is a troublesome section. It has a lot of shallows but also a high tidal range to help. North of Ben sawyer bridge is the worst. So is mcclelandville stretch. Not impossible but if you have a keel and protected props there will be no tragedies. Leave charleston on a rising tide. After Georgetown is the nicest, best stretch in the Waccama. Gregory Han > On Jul 14, 2014, at 8:20 AM, Joe <joroy40@hotmail.com> wrote: > > Have been waiting for a weather window to continue outside north from Charleston. Now considering ICW due to wave projections outside. Looking for general comments on ICW condition for that stretch. My power boat draws five feet. Thanks, Joe > _______________________________________________ > http://lists.trawlering.com/mailman/listinfo/great-loop_lists.trawlering.com > > To modify your Great-Loop subscription options (change email address, > unsubscribe, etc.) go to: http://lists.trawlering.com/mailman/options/great-loop_lists.trawlering.com

We've done that stretch with a 6' draft. Afterwards, I had no barnacles on my keel. It required precise timing of the tides and, in a few places, precise helmsmanship as well. The pucker factor was high. We swore never again, and now we wait in Charleston Harbor until weather is good for an outside run, which is very pleasant and lacks drama. YMMV, and you'll have longer windows and a wider swath of channel with your 5' draft than we did with our 6'. Our report on the ICW run, timing the tides (and scraping bottom): http://ourodyssey.blogspot.com/2013/04/timing-is-everything.html Nowadays we prefer the overnight run from Charleston to Cape Fear. Before we were comfortable with that, though, we stopped overnight in Winyah Bay. Not wanting to run another hour-plus each way up to Georgetown, we opted to drop the hook not far inside the bay. It was very pleasant, but we awoke in the middle of the night to find our prop spinning in the wicked current, and it took us a little while to figure out that we could just let it spin without a problem. Report here: http://ourodyssey.blogspot.com/2013/12/inbound-charleston-from-sea.html BTW, while our boat is a bluewater trawler that can take a lot more punishment than we can ourselves, we consider a "comfortable" forecast for outside to be seas no greater than 4' and a dominant period at least 2x the wave height. If we had no stabilizers I would probably drop that to seas less than 3'. -Sean m/y Vector lying Kiptopeke, VA http://OurOdyssey.BlogSpot.com On 07/14/2014 08:20 AM, Joe wrote: > Have been waiting for a weather window to continue outside north from Charleston. Now considering ICW due to wave projections outside. Looking for general comments on ICW condition for that stretch. My power boat draws five feet. Thanks, Joe > _______________________________________________ > http://lists.trawlering.com/mailman/listinfo/great-loop_lists.trawlering.com > > To modify your Great-Loop subscription options (change email address, > unsubscribe, etc.) go to: http://lists.trawlering.com/mailman/options/great-loop_lists.trawlering.com