A MIGHTY AMERICAN WATERWAY

We are on the Intracoastal Waterway as Tracey and I make passage from Annapolis to the Bahamas. It’s an amazing piece of engineering stretching 2,590 miles (4,800km) from Boston to Texas. It provides a protected maritime artery and has many guises as it seeks a path of least resistance, utilising rivers and protected bays where it can. At other times engineers have cleaved their way through a variety of geographical barriers. Being American it’s unlike the tiny capillaries we call canals: this artery can carry large ships.

For all its mighty scale, it is still subservient to Mother Nature and so we find ourselves on a pontoon in front of the South Carolina’s Socastee Bridge. Our Garcia Exploration 45, Pearl of Penzance, is going nowhere for this artery is well and truly blocked by flood water that meanders its way to the coast from well inland. Being so flat there isn’t the positive force of gravity that rushes water through our Cornish hills of home. This is a ponderous and unpredictable force, so we could be here for a while.

The first inkling that things were untoward was ‘haircut’, despite a falling tide, from