Myrtle Beach to Carolina Beach State Park

We pulled away from the dock at 7:10 this morning (4-26-17) and slid under the swing bridge just north of Barefoot Marina with our destination of Carolina Beach State Park being about 50 miles away. About a mile further up was the beginning of the infamous “Rock Pile” we heard so much about at the rendezvous. When creating the ICW years ago they ran into about a three mile stretch of solid granite which was very difficult to cut through. The channel is deep enough but only about 80 feet wide, the shear edges are shallow and can be seen at low tide, they are just waiting for you to drift out of the channel. Stay in the deep water and you're fine but drift onto the ledge and you can cause severe damage to your boat. We don't have an autopilot and Overtime's steering tends to do it's own thing when you're not paying attention; I paid close attention through the Rock Pile this morning and we came through without a scratch.
We were in a narrow waterway for the next several hours with three inlets along the way. An “inlet” is a path to the ocean for those who wish to go, it is also a path for the tides to ebb in and out of the waterway. This ebbing causes currents which can either speed you up or slow you down, today we hit 11 mph, our previous record was 10 mph. However, we would slow to 5 or 6 mph on the flip side of each inlet.
Our narrow waterway eventually emptied into Cape Fear River at which point we would turn left and head upstream. We approached the river on an outgoing tide and were at top speed when I saw a very well defined demarcation of the rivers flow to the ocean and the waterways end. Crossing that line took an effort to guide Overtime upstream rather than downstream and our speed went from 11 mph to just 2.8 mph; we also went from smooth water to two-foot rollers with a lot of chop on top. We inched along for the next half hour until the river widened and we slowly climbed up to 5 mph but each time the river narrowed we'd slow down a bit. We had ferries to dodge and go-fast boats overtaking us much closer than we liked. We were happy to finally reach the marina at the entrance to Snows Cut about an hour later than we had originally planned.
All of which made for an interesting day and high pucker-factor passage.