Video Transcript

Is this a good idea? Trying to show how high it is. Oh! Close. Plenty of room.

Welcome aboard Swamp Puppy. This is cruise number 14 of the Great Loop Waterway. We’re currently in Charleston, South Carolina. We’ve been here for five days. Elyse’s mom came over to visit and we anchored for five nights in a row, which is our longest stay anywhere. We’re looking forward to keeping on, keeping on.

We anchored at Brittlebank Park, which has a public dinghy dock. There’s actually a little pier there and it’s within walking distance of Publix, which is really nice. You could go downtown from there with a taxi or an Uber. It was within walking distance of numerous hotels, which is one of the reasons that we wanted to go tere as well.

You do have to go through Ashley River Memorial Bridge, which this morning had a clearance of 14 feet. That’s near high tide, which is why we dropped our bimini. It does open, I think, 9 AM to 5 PM or 9 AM to 4 PM, if I’m not mistaken. If you’re taller than that, just make sure you schedule it.

If you look at this anchorage here, it’s pretty busy.And then outside of this one near the main bridge and near the main Charleston area, there’s anchorages over by the USS Yorktown, which is really cool if you want a picture of your boat in front of an aircraft carrier. But it wasn’t rated very well. We actually went and toured that while we were here, which was excellent. I recommend it.

But for us, we like to get a little bit further away from everybody. And the Brittlebank Park wasn’t on the ICW. It didn’t have as much boat traffic and there was hardly anybody more there. In fact, when we dropped our anchor, there was only one other boat. When we left this morning, there was only four, whereas there’s thirty boats right here in front of the harbor, in front of the marinas. So, just keep that in mind. If you want more information about where we’re anchoring, it’s free on our website. We do little anchorage reviews and we also have captain’s logs. So, if you want to know what we’re up to, check it out there. And of course, here on YouTube or Facebook.

We’ve been cruising for 5 hours, we made it about 30 miles so far, and we have about 6 nautical miles to go. It’s been a slow, cold day, very windy. I mean, it’s not really that bad, it’s like 15-25 hour winds. It’s just kind of chilly, and it’s just constant wind. And unfortunately, most of the day, the current has been against us, or not in our favor. So right now, we’re going 5.5 knots, or about 6.3 miles per hour. Just before that cut, we were going 7.5 knots, which is almost 9 miles an hour. So it’s been a slow day, the sun really hasn’t come out too much, it’s been pretty dreary. So just chugging along, making some progress.

We made it to our anchorage, which is the Five Fathom Creek. Just off the ICW, pretty short. This will be our 23rd night anchoring out of 25 nights on the Great Loop so far. And the other two, we were on a free dock. So we have not been to a marina yet. 

If you think about it, we’ve gone from Key Largo, Florida, which is the Northern Key, all the way to Myrtle Beach, just about, and we’ve anchored the entire way. I think that’s pretty cool.

We did a little over 37 miles today, and we got the anchor set perfectly in time. By that, I mean, as soon as we set the anchor, it started to sprinkle a little bit. Which is nice, because it was pretty chilly today, and being rained on while it’s cold is never fun.It was a nice, beautiful cruise. For the most part, we were by quite a few houses. There were some open spaces. It was pretty windy, which is why we didn’t film a whole lot of talking, because it was just so windy. It was really hard to get those kind of shots.

We’re coming up on 500 miles on the Loop. That will be in our next video, and we’re going to do some costs as well. So that will be pretty cool. Again, if you’re looking for information about our anchorages, just jump over to our website, greatloopwaterway.com.

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We actually missed our turn because there was a shrimp boat running parallel with us in the ICW. They’re in a different creek. At first, I was like, are they running ground out there? Because they were pretty far away, but they kept getting closer and closer, and I realized, no, they’re definitely just in another little waterway over there.

It came out right at where we wanted to turn, and they were going to a little town. At the time, I didn’t realize that we needed to turn there. I was just following the way forward, and we got a little bit past it. I go to look at the map after we watched the cool shrimp boat because we got distracted with that. It was just cool, and all the birds, so many birds. So I look, and I’m like, oh, we just missed our turnoff for the anchorage. We’ve got to turn around. 

We pulled over to the side to turn around because “Knot On Call,” another Looper, was behind us pretty much all day. We pulled over to the side, and they actually hailed us to make sure we were okay, which was really nice of them because we were kind of over to the side in some skinnier water. But we were just waiting for them to go by so we could turn around because it wasn’t really wide.

But I thought that was kind of funny. You know, things happen.

Unfortunately, it’s a rainy day outside, or maybe it’s fortunately because that means we’re trapped inside with pancakes. Elyse made a little blackberry compote to go on top. Look at that.

It is 63 out there and 67 in here.