Driving off the edge of the Earth

South Carolina's Waccamaw River is an impressive stream where it joins flows with the Black, Pee Dee and Sampit Rivers to form Winyah Bay at Georgetown. It was a dark and cloudy morning last Tuesday when Ms. Bettencourt transited the Bay and headed upstream. The destination was Conway, SC, a little town located near the navigable end of the Waccamaw.

Like many minor rivers in the South and Southeast US, the Waccamaw served as highway for commerce from colonial times until the coming of the railroads. In the years before the Civil War, the river was lined, first with indigo, then rice plantations. Georgetown was a rich shipping nexus for agricultural riches coming from the interior. Today, there is still evidence of the rice culture along the Waccamaw. The structure in the photo below marks a rice irrigation canal on the western bank of the river a few miles upstream from Georgetown.

Almost all the rice plantations behind these canal gateways have reverted to marshland. Much of this area  is government protected, serving as wildfowl habitat and breeding grounds for ocean creatures, most notably shrimp.



Farther up the river, which still runs wide and holds channel depths from 20 to 30 feet, you'll find a few modern marinas serving housing communities. Houses and condos are often out of sight from the river behind low-lying cypress swamps. Then the river begins to narrow.

Major Sims photo

The tops of many of the larger cypress trees were shorn off by Hurricane Hugo, which swept through the area in 1989.








And the river continues to narrow. Lengthening shadows late in the day give the stream a somewhat ominous aspect.

Major Sims photo

I have been a longtime user of Claiborne Young's Cruising Guide to Coastal South Carolina and Georgia. We had a copy aboard Ms. Bettencourt. The first time I read the following admonition, it didn't really register.

Writing about the Upper Waccamaw, Young says: "Most of the route is uncharted, but it is well-marked and easy to follow if you watch out for various forks along the way."


Then rounding a slight bend, as the river continued to narrow, we learned the meaning of  "uncharted." It means that your chartplotter has no cartography. No soundings. Not even stream boundaries. We had driven off the edge of the Earth.

This screenshot from my Garmin 546s chartplotter shows part of our tracks to and from Conway. Before we made those tracks, there was just plain, empty green screen on the chartplotter. We were hurtling, blindly, at 6 knots through a solid green uncharted never-never land

And the river was getting narrower and loopier. And it was getting later in the day. And we had not seen a sunbeam since the previous week.

My friend Major claimed he was hearing dueling banjos. Then he started humming the theme from Gilligan's Island. "We may never get out of here," he said, clasping an unopened package of Oreo cookies to his chest. "When the food is all gone, these will cost you $8 each."

Of course we had the paper charts for the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. However, the Upper Waccamaw is not to be found there. But finally, as the river narrowed even more, we began to see day markers. They were widely spaced, but they were useful guides. Eventually we began to see houses. A little later we found the Conway City Marina and, an hour or so after that, a decent Philly steak sandwich just a few blocks down Elm Street.

An early departure the next morning came with just a little low lying fog and a hint of sunshine. Then the sun popped up, and we got a good look at all the sights that were just looming in the murk on the trip upstream. For example, the coffee color of the river water became evident in the wake.

The Waccamaw is one of several South Carolina rivers known as blackwater streams. The coloration comes from tannins leached from the cypress swamps.







Before long, and after getting lost in upper river loops only twice, we found the Lower Waccamaw. An outgoing tide, plus the river's current, moved Ms. Bettencourt at surprising speeds. At one point we clocked a GPS speed over the ground of  7.9 knots. That's fast for a boat with a calculated hull speed of 6.2 knots and a cruising speed closer to 5.5.

We were back at our space in Georgetown's Harborwalk Marina with plenty of daylight left before supper. Ms. Bettencourt was on her trailer at 9:30 the following morning, and back at her dock in the Savannah River at Augusta before 3 p.m.


Trip statistics

Our explorations out and back totaled about 75 nautical miles. We put 18.4 hours on the engine, which burned 12.5 gallons of diesel fuel. That works out to a burn rate of 0.68 gallons per hour.

The next voyage

 Destinations we talked about driving back included the Dry Tortugas National Park, about 70 miles West of Key West Florida; Sanford, Florida, via Jacksonville and the St. Johns River, and the Gulf  Intracoastal waterway via Stuart, Florida, and the Okeechobee Waterway.

And, of course, we will be closely watching the diplomatic news, looking for any change of rules that might allow a call at the Port of  Havana.