We pulled the anchor and departed at 0700 hours from Beaufort, SC this morning... had the current against us full force first thing... making 5.5 knots all the way down the Beaufort River... made our turn up Port Royal Sound and had a short lived burst of speed making 8 knots... until we turned into the Skull Creek... again current on our bow slowed down to 6 knots... it's a constant loop back and forth with the current in this area... you just hope that you have more time with a boost... with no boost from the current we would make 6.5 knots... so today we averaged 6.51 knots so I guess we had a little more boost today... :)

The tides are much more extreme than I remember them being any time in the past... today as we cruised through the last of SC into GA I checked the tide range and we had over 10 foot rise and fall and of course dead low tide was mid afternoon... approximately 1430 hours... but it made for some really skinny water... only one place really gave us any worries and that was Hell Gate... the cut between the Little Ogeechee River to the Ogeechee River... it's notorious for shoaling... we have been through it many times and never really had any trouble with shoaling... today was a different story... I had never seen it like the it was today... there was exposed land to the port of us and there was maybe a 100 foot wide span between the exposed shoal to port and Raccoon Key to our starboard... we slowed to bare idle and the shallow water alarm was singing all the way through... it is set to 6 foot deep and we saw 5-5.5 feet for several hundred yards...and the deepest I saw in the cut was 7.1 feet as we passed through... and it was 1545 hours... this was an hour and 15 minutes after dead low tide... we would not of made it through at low tide.

We had very little cruisers traffic today... in fact no one passed us going south or north... we did have two sailboats that left Beaufort the same time as we did following us most of the day but they were moving a little slower and soon we lost sight of them behind us... there was a lot of small local boat traffic... :)

The weather was nice all day... not a lot of wind and the sun was shinning... :)

We had thought we would try and get to Walburg Creek and anchor but it would have been after dark so we opted out of that and went to one of our favorite marinas... Kilkenny Marina... on Kilkenny Creek... We were turned on to this marina several years ago by a good friend of ours... Don Gillete... Kilkenny was one of his stops as he took his boat north and south each year... we love it here... :) At approximately 1730 hours we were secure to the dock at Kilkenny Marina.

We traveled today for 10 hours and 30 minutes covering 68.32 nautical miles and averaging 6.51 knots.

Trip totals to date:

Distance: 1137.03 nautical miles
Hours: 178 hours 41 minutes
Avg Spd: 6.36 knots
Days not moving: 12