The Rocna Rocks

The Rocna Rocks   …   Tuesday 13th November 2012

I have to be honest and tell you I chose the title for the blog entry before we even dropped hook tonight. Our new Rocna anchor did indeed seem to grab well and I'm fairly confident we are secure, but our situation seems distinctly weird. We arrived at Tom Point Creek, "one of the better anchorages in the area", shortly after 5pm and had only a little time to anchor before it got dark. All went well, but then we seemed to be pushed over the anchor by the wind but stopped from turning up by the current, and now we are in the position of having the anchor chain going back under the boat and are listing slightly to starboard because of the pressure of the wind. We did restart our engine and backed up again to ensure we weren't snagged on something. Everything seemed fine except we returned to this strange position! Because it's now dark it's hard to know what if anything we can do - so let's hope the Rocna does rock!

We've been struggling with current all day as we made our way through rivers and cuts towards Beaufort SC. We left Charleston shortly after noon so that we could time our arrival at Elliot Cut when the current should be approaching slack. According to the information we had from both the web and our chart-plotter, the current can run at 4 knots in this half mile long section, but by arriving at 12:45pm we would have less than 1 knot of current against us and then favorable currents thereafter. Bullshit squared! The cut was a raging torrent. This was like the Menai straights off Anglesey. We watched a boat ahead of us struggling through, did a quick loop back so we weren't too close to him, and then had to power through at max revs. At one point we were doing 7 knots through the water and 2.2 knots over the ground. Even accounting for the inaccuracies of the measurements that's one hell of a lot of current! We made it through unscathed but continued to fight adverse current for another hour and half until we passed another tributary and within a couple of minutes had favorable current. We have checked and re-checked the tidal / current data and our experience seems to bear little resemblance to what is happening on the ground. One advantage of that is you don't need to do much planning, so we'll just get up in the morning and go, irrespective of what the currents are supposed to be doing!

Mike

32 38 45.9 N, 80 16 54.3 W

Freedom Trail in the Edisto River - we were excited to see this boat because we had seen and photographed  her once before in Long Island Sound the day before we transited the East River (see 1st October blog entry)