Routes to Southport

I know people who look upon coastal cruising as just another boat trip. They load up the boat with ice, food and beverages, trailer off to the water, splash the boat and have fun. While that approach may work for some, it won't for me.

I have to know where I'm going, when I'm leaving and returning, and most of what is to happen in between. You may call that obsessive. I call it prudent. I still have fun.

My friend Major and I are going to Southport, NC, late next month. Generally, the plan is to trailer Ms. Bettencourt to Georgetown, SC, then proceed up the Atlantic Intracoastal
Waterway in a northeasterly direction. The round trip will take at least several days. We'll be getting together next week to firm up specifics.

Meanwhile, I have been acquiring charts and messing around with GPS routes. Ms. Bettencourt has a Garmin 546s chart plotter and I use Garmin BlueChart and Garmin Homeport software on a PC to plot routes for our trips.

I have set up an older PC with the navigation software and a 12-volt power supply for the chartplotter in one corner of an office in our home. I keep my charts, files, cruising guides and other stuff nearby. The resulting accumulation has turned into a very useful "navigation station."

Here's the setup. If you click to enlarge the photo you will probably be able to see the routes for the Southport cruise on the PC monitor with the waypoints mirrored on the chartplotter.








So far, this work has produced four route segments. I broke the journey into four pieces, based on factors such as estimated departure time, tides, currents and potentially interesting places to stop.

The following table comes from routes data calculated by the software. It should provide a handy guide, both as we make planning decisions and after we get on the water.

Trip segment		Distance (nm)		Time (hours)
Georgetown-Osprey Marina		23.8		3.5
Osprey-Myrtle Beach		12.2		1.8
Myrtle-Bellamy's F.C.		31.1		4.5
Bellamy's-Southport		12		1.8
TL nautical miles		79.1
TL on-water hours				11.6

A lot of decision making and fine tuning remains to be done, but this is the way I usually get started planning for a cruise.

I would be very interested to learn how other cruisers approach their trip planning. Please share your wisdom and ideas for improvement using the comments form below.