CC Yacht Delivery: Daytona Beach, FL to Hilton Head, SC to Myrtle Beach

Sorry for the lack of an update yesterday. We had the longest day I have ever traveled solely on the ICW. We ran for 12 and half hours and covered 267 miles. We ran all the way from Daytona Beach, FL to Hilton Head, SC. It was kind of interesting how it all happened.

First of all, the boat is running great. She is cruising around 28mph at 80% load. We thought we would go from Daytona to St Simons Island, GA on Saturday. However, we arrive at St Simons around 2:00 in the afternoon. There was no way were going to stop then. So we continued on and we started calling marinas around 50 miles out. One after the other were full. We tried Kilkenny, then Isle of Hope, then every single marina on the ICW in Savannah, GA. All were full for the weekend. We finally reach Harbor Town in Hilton Head and they were willing to put us on the fuel dock since they would be closed by the time we arrived and we would be leaving early the next day. Harbor Town was also full since they are hosting the Heritage Golf Tournament starting on Monday. We got in at 7:30pm just before it got dark.

Anyway, we didn't really have much of a choice. So on we went. The kicker to this whole story was that it was low tide running through Georgia. Anyone who has run the ICW through GA knows how shallow it can be. We hit Hell's Gate at dead low tide. Add to that 20kt wind out of the Northwest blowing all the water out of the sound and we had record low water. I would estimate that more navigation markers were out of the water high and dry than were actually in the water. Without exaggeration, it was the most intense and most scared I've been running a boat. Not only because it was shallow, but if one of the pods were to touch bottom, it was all over.

Thank goodness that someone watched over us. We creep through many spots at idle churning up mud and silt, but we made it through without any problems. Having run the stretch so many times really helped and I knew were all the shallow spots were. We heard many boats throughout the day calling SeaTow and BoatUS for help because they ran aground.

Today was a much different story. We first had to fuel up this morning which went without a hitch. We started to topped off the tanks at 7:00am sharp when they opened and got underway at 8:00. We about had run the boat dry yesterday with our long 12+ hour run. Once underway, we chased a rising tide until noon. So we had lots of water running through SC, behind Isle of Palms and McClellansville which are historically very shallow along the ICW.

We made pretty good time throughout the day. We stopped at Osprey Marina for fuel on our way to Barefoot Landing in Myrtle Beach. Osprey Marina was as full as "7 in a bed". We had to raft off to a sailboat to take on fuel since the fuel dock was already jammed full of transients for the night. Osprey Marina had diesel fuel today at $1.54/gallon with all of my discounts. I wish fuel prices stay this way for a long time.

So, that brings you up to date on the past 2 days. Brad and I are pretty tired from running long days, but we are really happy with our progress so far. To run the entire ICW from Miami to Myrtle Beach in 4 days is pretty good. We hope the weather is going to calm down some finally and we will get to run off-shore tomorrow. We have our fingers crossed.