Kilkenny - at a dock

The Kilkenny Marina dockhouse - complete with chairs

Today the challenge was Mud River. It is famous for being very shallow but today it was even shallower. For purposes of communicating with other boaters, all depths are given in Mean Low Water (MLW) which allows other boaters to access the nearest tide station and then add the height of the tide to your input and then see if they can get through. At the Mud River (aptly named), the lowest depth I saw today was only 3.7 MLW. So if you happen to come through at low tide, there's only 3.7 ft of water in the channel! That's the least amount of depth we've seen in the Mud River since we've been doing the ICW the last four years. That's typical of the attention the ICW getts from Georgia and South Carolina. The boaters are just "passing through" and we're not considered an important source of income, apparently. At some point, the ICW will become impassable even at high tide! At any rate, we came through Mud River with a 4.5 ft tide so we had enough water depth for our 4' 9" draft sailboat.

A view down main street - note the long horizontal limbs, typical of live oaks

We had intended anchoring out at Wahoo Creek but the tides were such that we would have reached the anchorage by 1:30 so we decided to push on to Kilkenny Marina. It's strategically located just 10 miles south of Hell Gate, another notorious shallow spot on the ICW. By taking a dock here we're situated to reach Hell Gate with a healthy 6 ft high tide. We could even float over spots that were dry at low tide!

No southern yard is complete without a swing on a live oak

Kilkinney Marina is in Georgia and is typical rustic Georgia. It's surrounded by huge live oak trees and friendly people. We took on diesel and are all set for the Thunderbird Marina on Monday for two days.

One face dock next to the Kilkenny Creek