It seems most the world has heavy traveled cruising routes, hard to
avoid. Bringing up the cost of cruising for everyone. What ever
happened to naked native rowing out bearing gifts to the only boat to
visit in years?

Anchorages on the ICW are plenty. Lots of shallow bays you can ease out
of the channel, small rivers, petro cuts, and many lay points for the
barges, huge set of pilons put in by companies and the corp or engrs
for boats to wait out locks, docks, ect.. I think most heavy cargo on
your coast moves via offshore tows or composite units. Here it is
cheaper to keep heavy boats in the ditch due to short distances. Most
ICW traffic here is fuel, chemicals, grain, gravel, giant items. You
can build 5 nice ICW tugs for the cost of one offshore tug or
composite, and push or pull 1/2 the tonnage with each. I would suspect
more is spent here because the tonnage is much higher.

The inlets here between the Sabine River and Galveston bay are spaced
about 25-60 miles apart, And if you timed it wrong pushing 250,000
gallons of fuel with a single screw, 8-71 natural detroit luger tug,
you could spend the entire trip at a grinding 2-3 knots... or flying
along at 9-10 knots. We could predict the slosh within 10-15 min.

Did not matter as much when the barge was empty. We would just hope to
have 25-30 knots wind from the north or south so we could sail the
barge.

Joe