The Skinny On The ICW (intracoastal waterway)

We left Beaufort,NC 5 days ago and are now in a Marina in Charleston,SC....The trip down the ICW was filled with incredibly gorgeous scenery, amazing homes, beautiful wildlife and Scary Skinny Water..When I say skinny I mean skinny. Skinny means shallow...the Icw is maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. Their job is to try to maintain the depths of the ICW at a minimum of 12 feet. Their mission is impossible because of one thing: Mother Nature. As you motor down the IcW you pass inlets that have water constantly flowing in and out of them from the Atlantic Ocean. This flow of water causing erosion and shoaling at each of these openings...One day (after the Corps dreges)the inlet could have 12 feet of water and then just a month later the water is only 5 feet..(at low tide)....Certain areas are worse than others. Bottom line: we never went completely aground.YEAH! We had some incredibly nerve racking scenarios but we did not go hard aground. Part of the time we had some huge motor yachts in front of us that would call us on the VHF and tell us about some skinny 5 foot depths and try to tell us what part of the channel we should stay closer to..At one partcularly shallow area John made the decision to go outside the channel marker to get to deeper water. This concept is counterintuitive...But it worked....Pretty cool! It's amazing you can actually start to think that 9.9 feet is deep water. We have a draft of 6.6 feet, meaning we need at the very least 7 feet to not go aground. We also anchored at a creek off the IcW
in rainy, awful cold weather. As soon as we started to anchor the wind popped up to 25-30 knots. The Nationl weather service came on to say that an unexpected gale came thru the exact area we were in...no where else. To say that the nite was dark(pitch black),windy and miserable is an understatement. The next morning in very foggy weather we preceeded to move further South. The sun finally came out when we got to Charleston...Thanks to Blue Blaze for their support...sometimes they would the lead boat and contact us immediately to tell us to go to the right or left to get to deeper water....Big help!Some pics of the ICW...