12/11/14
Breakfast Creek, Georgia ICW
Position 31 56.195N, 80 40.673W
Posted by Bill

Well…we finally broke the hold that Beaufort/Port Royal had on us and pushed off the dock at 7:21 AM. We motored all day, moving through Port Royal Sound, past Hilton Head Island and Daufuskie Island; and wound along the ICW. Our first bad shoal area was Fields Cut, where the ICW meets the Savannah River, and we hit it 30 minutes after high tide…piece of cake! We made such good time that we made it to our preferred and furthest anchorage choice: Breakfast Creek. One never knows if the tides are going to be with you or against you because of the way the ICW meets the ocean and the tributaries that flow into it, so we plan for worst case, tide against us all the way and have several anchorage or marina choices depending on how well we are moving.

The views were very pretty along the way.
Looking back at Hilton Head on the ICW:

The famous Harbor Town and it’s light house on Hilton Head:

Haig Point light house on Daufuskie Island:

We also saw lots of dolphins today:

We only had one draw bridge to content with and we hit it during a period of “open on request” so we breezed through it as well.

Even after all of these ICW miles it still amazes us to see the number of homes like these.


Where does all the money come from? It just goes on like this for miles and miles.

We saw some pretty big boats as usual.

Then as we were making our way up the Vernon River to our anchorage, we saw this sort of forest fire, and the helicopter getting buckets full of water, dumping on the fire, and repeat. It was pretty cool as we have never seen this live in action before.

The anchorage is quiet and protected and lined by really nice homes.

Only bad thing is that it is abnormally cold for a few days. The last few days we were tied to our dock with the heat pump running. The next few will be at anchor. We froze all day in winds, albeit light, and temps mostly in the 40s. The low tonight and the next few nights will be around 42…and we don’t have heat at anchor. Yuk! Good thing we are only a few days from Florida and the temps are supposed to get back to normal…slowly.

Our excellent progress today will have us well staged for the next serious shoal area, Hell Gate.