Saturday, October 22, 2016

Marina Inn at Grande Dunes - The bridge is open!!!!

Why does anyone need four outboards?
We were sitting on the back of our boat this afternoon when the newly arrived boaters next to us returned from an outing. They announced that they heard the Socastee Swing Bridge was resuming normal operations! Great news! The previous news was that that the repair was going to take two weeks. In retrospect what I think happened was that the bridge operator, who is a real curmudgeon, didn't want to bother answering calls on the bridge status so he gave an outlandish date for resuming operation with the note not to call until sometime next week. I'm sure he's justified in his own head regardless of all the wrong decisions he caused up the line on boats coming down the ICW, he doesn't care. It made his job easier.

We haven't seen debris in the ICW but we're getting some in the marina
So with the new news, we'll head out Sunday morning for Georgetown. We will be on a quick trip south with no extended stops so we can reach Titusville as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we will be  completely out of sync with the tides and will hit every shallow spot exactly at low tide, such is boating.

I took on water tonight and we'll be up early Sunday for shoving off. We are bow into a slip with a good 1 to 2 kt current pushing us into the slip from the flood water. The fun Sunday will be how to back out of the slip. Should  we back out and then put the boat in forward and hope we'll clear what we just left or just back out all the way. I think we'll chose the latter option. Once you have steerage, why give it up in close quarters. I'll take a photo of the bridge for everyone.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

So happy to hear you are able to continue today. We hope to leave Barefoot Marina later this week after waters are low enough to make the 63.5' clearance we require. Will be interested to learn what readings you see for the bridges with height boards. Hooe to see you further down the line. Mary and Rod