Phil Herl Reviews Sherer’s 2015 ICW Cruising Guide and Robert Sherer’s Response
Phil and Sandy Herl have been submitting marina reviews along their 2015 Fall migration and SSECN is grateful for their page by page comments on the Sherer text. Robert Sherer is author of 2015 ICW Cruising Guide: A guide to navigating the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. See /?p=150181.
CLICK HERE for the complete Review for Bob and Ann Sherer’s 2015 ICW Cruising Guide, as well as Author Sherer’s response.
Comments from Cruisers (2)
Hi
I do not know where the 140 hazards are. I have been up and down the ICW a few times and have a hard time thinking of 10 areas that are hazardous. I am sick of all the “experts?” making less experienced cruisers worry about the trip up and down the ICW. Whoever can find the 140 hazards would be better off staying home, at least better for the rest of us.
Happy cruising
Hi Stein,
I agree that traveling the ICW should be a pleasant experience with not having to worry about hazards along the way. In fact, if you travel through the shallow spots only at high tide there are no hazards, so far there is still enough water everywhere. Unfortunately, I cannot quite make all the shallows at just high tide and hit some at 1/2 or low tide. Such low spots are marked in Active Captain by a yellow marker (as well as missing markers and obstructions) which allows for comments by boaters. Whenever I pass through a yellow marker I update the Active Captain database for reference by other boaters. If you look at the shallow hazards in AC, almost all will show at least one boater and often more that went aground at that location.
Now some are more severe than others with some impassable at low tide like Hell Gate and, up until the dredging, the shallows north of the Ben Sawyer Bridge in Isle of Palms. Through others you may drag your keel at low tide depending on your draft like through Mud River, Ashepoo-Coosaw Cut Off, Jekyll Island and several others. It’s still good to know the best path for depth through these areas.
For other areas not so severe, there have still been boats going aground from encroaching shoals from one side or the other in the channel. In such cases there are deep water routes if you know them. The most famous one in this category are the shallows south of Fernandina where there is a shoal to 3 ft in the middle of the channel, recently marked on charts by the Coast Guard with a 3ft warning at low tide encompassing the entire area. However, there is a 10 ft route that avoids all the shoals (there are several shoals, not just the one in the middle) which I published on Cruisernet last month and is also posted on Active Captain.
After 5 years of traveling up and down the ICW I found many boaters use my posts on AC and several asked for all the information to be in one location. Looking around I found Amazon to be the easiest to use so I published a guide book there, “2015 ICW Cruising Guide”, both in hardcopy and ebook format. The ebook is only $4.95 but the hardcopy is $29.95 due to all the color pages.
Traveling the ICW should be a pleasant experience and knowing how to best avoid touching bottom keep you on an even keel, so to speak, allowing for more enjoyment along the way.
Good boating! Bob Sherer