McClellanville SC – Leland Oil Company (Port #80) ; May 13

Remember the last long post from Charleston ?
This will make up, and be a very short one.

After a wonderful 4 days in Charleston, we continued to head north.
Next stop was a very small fishing town of 1000 people, called McClellanville South Carolina.

The 40 mile trip north was not w/o excitement.
We departed Charleston about 8:30am.
I had known before we left, that there was going to be some skinny water as we approached McClellanville. As we got within 10 miles of McClellanville, the radio chatter picked up dramatically about how low the water was at marker #37, one mile south of our marina.
Some radio callers said “it’s completely shoaled over” !

It was about 12 noon, the tide was still going out until 1:00pm (I knew this well in advance of the radio chatter), so we decided to anchor for about 3 hours. We dropped anchor in 6 feet of water at 12:30pm and picked the anchor up in 7.5 feet of water about 3:30pm (+1.5ft).
When we passed thru the infamous marker #37 @ 4pm, we saw 6 feet of water.
We draft only 3’/9″, but if we would have continued thru at noon, we would have been in about 4.5 feet of water (6ft – 1.5ft) and grounding would have been close, and it was not worth the risk of damaged props.

While we were anchored, we got some work done while waiting for the tide to come back in.
We cleaned all the Isinglass, checked the oil, the bilge, & the stuffing boxes.
And we plotted out our courses for the next 2 stops ;
> McClellanville to Georgetown
> Georgetown to Myrtle Beach

We are staying only 1 night at a place called the Leland Oil Company, the place is really a fuel stop that has power, water, and showers. The primary purpose of Leland Oil is to supply fuel for the large fleet of Shrimping Boats in the same harbor.

Tomorrow we will head to Georgetown South Carolina for 3 days.
We will meet Dave & Ginger Hinman on Tuesday afternoon.
They will spend 11 days with us (yea) !
The extended forecast looks like a bunch of indoor activities (humm, what will we do ?)

That’s all folks, see you in Georgetown !