Southport was a nice little town. The marina dock master lent us his Jeep and we drove into town and walked around for a while...pretty little town centered on the waterfront and with a view to the Little River ocean inlet. We hit the local bakery and went back to the marina where the restaurant was serving a prime rib dinner for 10 bucks... a nice change from all the seafood we've been having...real men need blood red meat once in a while!

We left Southport at about 9AM to allow the sun to warm things up a bit after a chilly night. Motoring down towards Myrtle Beach the wind was gusting to 20 knots or so and we were cold all day in the cockpit. The inlets and side channels in this area of the waterway cause shoaling so you need to be really diligent about staying in the middle of the channel and not drifting towards the edge. Ray veered a bit left of center in one such stretch and we followed in his wake thinking that he was avoiding such shoals. As we watched the depth sounder drop slowly from 14 ft to 6 ft we realized he was out of the channel and veered sharply back but still bumped the soft mud bottom at 5.5 feet before making it back into deep water. Ray draws only 5 feet so he made it back without bumping!

The other major event of the day was a small power boat that was swamped and sank about 25 feet from shore.

We had been passed by a large motor yacht (maybe 60 ft long), earlier in the day. He was very courteous as he passed and slowed down so as not to cause his wake to rock us. About 2 hours later we heard a call to the coast guard on our radio talking about a boat having sunk with 6 people on it followed quickly by additional reports that the same polite power boat that had passed us earlier had left a wake that had caused this small boat to swamp and sink. As we came up to the scene you could see the local rescue squad and all kinds of other folks and the sunken small power boat with about 3 inches of the engines showing above water. Apparently everyone got out OK. Since this was in a no wake zone the motor yacht will probably be held responsible but it appears that the small boat was quite overloaded as well...so there was fault on both sides. That incident provided several hours of diversion on the radio and thankfully no one was injured.

We pulled into Myrtle Beach Yacht Club marina for the night and plugged in the heat pump as it may hit the upper 20's tonight....brrrr. We hope to do a lot more anchoring out as we get further down the waterway but right now, with the cold and gusty winds...we'd rather not feel like we're camping out! Ray says to figure 2 out of 3 days on the ICW will wind up in Marinas...but 9 out of 10 days in the Bahamas can be spent at anchor so I guess it will all even out in the end. //GB