Trawling the ICW, day 8
We stayed in port today. Frank rented a car to visit family, and Iputtered around the boat. Our layover was well timed with the weather. The wind was blowing with enthusiasm from the south, just the direction we would be going. I enjoyed a day of goofing off more than usual, and I assume that Frank enjoyed a day with no navigational decisions to make concerning buoy locations, bridge heights, or water depth.Bridges on the ICW are interesting in that you never quite know ahead of time how high they will be, and whether or not your boat will fit under them without the need to ask the bridge tender for a lift. At first glance, you would think that you could just check your chart and read off the bridge height. You can indeed do just that, but the published bridge height is not the whole story. There are 2 more things to consider. One is that the tides are constantly changing the distance from the water's surface to the underside of the bridge. The other variable is the shape of the bridge. Some bridge spans are higher in the middle. The bottom line is that you never really know the bridge height until you call the bridge tender on the vhf, and even THEN they might not tell you (though they usually do). Bridge openings are another issue. Some bridges open only at certain times. Some open only on request. And a few open only on request at certain times. Bridges on the ICW are great fun. Did I mention that different bridges use different vhf frequencies?
As an overview, the ICW I had traveled so far typically had a reasonably wide channel around 12 feet deep (notice that I used the word "typically" and not "always"). There was "typically" plenty of room for 3 yachts to all pass each other at the same time. The area that I traveled between Charleston and Palm Beach was usually rural, and often swampy. There are some very nice and very large houses along the waterway, but these houses are generally scattered along the shoreline. I later noticed 2 changes in the overall character of the ICW, both of them south of the Georgia Florida border. The first change was that the number of large, modern, waterfront houses seemed to significantly increase in Florida. There was still plenty of streaches of undeveloped swamp in Florida, but there was a definate increase in the density of housing. The other big change I noticed in the ICW was much clearer water by the time we were nearing the Palm Beach area.
Although most of the ICW is a reasonably wide channel through swamp land, there are areas of open water. The ICW makes use of several bays and sounds as it makes it's way south along the coast. Often, these sounds are very shallow; 3 feet or less. Such a vast area of shallow water is a sure fire recipie for rough water when the wind picks up. It is not unusual for pleasure boats to remain in port on a windy day when they need to cross one of these large sounds. We traveled for at least 2 days on something called the Indian River, which was really not a river at all, but rather a wide area of water between barrier islands on the Atlantic sea shore to the east, and the mainland to the west. I think half of it was shallow enough to wade across.
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