PSG-1 » Today, 08:28[/url]"]
[url=https://www.tinboats.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=319706#p319706 said:
FBRDrifter » Yesterday, 21:45[/url]"]Sandbars really are not any problem. The drop of the river in the area we fish is pretty good so it's pretty much rock. There are a few holes that do have sandy bottoms though. To give you an idea what I am looking at, here are a couple pics. The one with the Musky is in about 6-7 foot of water and a sandy bottom. No problems in that section of water (but it is also where that biggggg rock is as well).The one with the smallie is in about 4 foot of water and a rocky bottom. You can see how much timber is in the water as well as the speed of the water and the natural swirls. This water is very hard to read without someone on the bow looking out or some kind of indicator.
I see what you mean. Those 2 pictures look similar to the rivers here at the coast, the first one looks like the Little PeeDee, and the second one looks like it could have been on the Waccamaw or Santee River.
See, check it out:
That's a shot of the Little Pee Dee river, near Marion, SC. To the casual observer, it almost looks like the same stretch of river. But the Little Pee Dee originates from a blackwater swamp, no rocks whatsoever.
Like I said, your photo is very deceiving... at a glance, you wouldn't know there are rocks in that river. At least not from the photos. But a quick looks at google earth says otherwise! You can clearly see rocks in that river. Lots of 'em.
I'm down here on the coast, we have NO rocks whatsoever, the only obstructions we have to deal with are logs and sandbars in the rivers.
Here in saltwater, it's sandbars and oyster beds. In the salt water, there's usually good enough visibility, you can see the shoal areas in up to 4-5 ft of water. In the rivers, it's a little different, because the tannic acid stains the rivers here really dark brown, almost black. In those conditions, you can only see a shoal that's in less than 1 foot of water.
As for running in rocky rivers, I've been as far up as Cheraw, where the fall line begins, but no farther. To the point we went to (Thompson's Creek, about 2 miles downstream from Cheraw) there were some gravel shoals, but no boulders in the river. But go just a few miles farther, and you're into the fall line, which demarcates the coastal floodplain from the lower piedmont.
Here's a really neat feature of the Great PeeDee, just below US 74 near Rockingham:
View attachment 1
Those zig-zagging rock formations are the remains of prehistoric fishing weirs, constructed by the Cheraw indians. I've yet to see a formation like this in any other rivers around here, and I've done a lot of looking around with google earth. but you can see how those extend all the way across the river. That's the kind of thing that makes me apprehensive about going any farther upstream than Cheraw.