In the ICW all the Bridges are 65’… Except the Ones that Aren’t!

Otherwise Known As Bridge Limbo

So all the bridges in the ICW are a minimum of 65′, except when the water is high as in a during a coastal flood or high tide or wind tide or when the Army Corp of Engineers doesn’t build the bridge to specs.

Now I’ve already told you I’ve been ducking at each and every bridge, I thought actually, I was getting better when I didn’t even flinch at the last Bascule bridge (okay, okay a Bascule bridge lifts in the middle so you can’t hit it – maybe that’s not particularly brave of me). Then I heard that there was a problem with some of the bridges in the ICW, not all of them actually have 65′ clearance.

Well that wasn’t what I needed to hear to make me feel more comfortable about clearing those annoying bridges. See our boat, near as we can tell, has an air draft of about 63 ft. That means that from the water to the top of our main mast we stand 63 ft. Then on top of the mast we have an antenna. Well if the bridge is really 65 ft high we should be fine with 18″ clearance. However some of the bridges are only 64 ft which reduces our actual clearance to less than a foot when you factor in the antenna.

Throw in a little coastal flooding, nominal tide or wind tide (don’t even get me started about this as there seems to be no predicting and no reporting of exactly what, where or when the wind tide might be) then suddenly that your remaining 6″ seems like an unreasonably small margin. Is it any wonder then that I cringe when we go under bridges?

I have to admit that these were not things that I considered when contemplating sailing away for a year. Now, well I think about it daily, sometimes several times a day depending how many bridges we have to go under on a given day.

The good news is that notwithstanding my personal inclination to duck we have slid under every bridge so far, even the 64′ bridge. Looking up at the underside of that bridge the kids pointed to the marks of other boats’ masts on the underside of the bridge. Probably that wasn’t the best thing for my confidence either. At least we didn’t hit.