Crawling Northward

This is not the best way to start your boating weekend

We departed Port Royal on Saturday May 17 in a cool stiff north breeze, typical for the day after a cold front.  We had to again plan for the shallow sections of the ICW by timing our arrival at mid-tide or better.  Yet we’re still in an area of 9’ tidal ranges, and the currents during tidal changes can get up to 2.5 mph.

The house in Beaufort where the movies "The Great
Santini" and "The Big Chill" were filmed

As we’re traveling, Sue reads in a guide book the answer to her questions.  For the past couple days at the marina, Sue kept hearing a noise below the boat sounding like bacon frying in a pan.  She looked all around the bowels of the boat but found nothing.  She now reads that we’re in the waters with snapping shrimp.  For you scientists and engineers, these snapping shrimp will snap their large claw so quickly that they create a rapid change in water pressure, which causes cavitation bubbles to form.  When these small bubbles pop, the noise can be as loud as 200 decibels.  We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto!

Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor

We pick an anchorage for the night in a side creek.  Even though we have two other boats anchored in the creek, it is so quiet at dusk and the dolphins come so close to the boat, that we can hear them “blow” when they surface.  We watch the brown pelicans dive for fish, sometimes with a “thief” seagull right behind it, trying to steal the fish out of the mouth of the pelican.  We try to identify all the different birds, including two whooping cranes returning to their nest in the marsh.  This is a tough life!

The second day, we enter Charleston Harbor & see the waterfront covered wall-to-wall with marinas & boats.  At the entrance to the harbor, we take a slight detour from the ICW to take a couple shots at Fort Sumter (with our camera, of course).

After anchoring a second night, we have a short trip into Georgetown SC.  Another cold front came through during the night and today we are hit with 20 mph winds, gusting to 30, right on our nose.  In sections of the ICW where the ebb tide is opposing the strong winds, we have 1’ waves and whitecaps on the ICW! Not necessarily a comfortable ride.

Fake storefronts painted on the back of buildings
in downtown Georgetown.

We make our marina in Georgetown, and see two familiar boats – a sailboat from Canada who we first met 3 days ago as we left Beaufort (and who anchored in the same place that we did last night), and a powerboat who was in the slip next to us at the Sanford FL marina this past winter.

At the seafood store, this Great White Egret came
all the way into the store to get her free shrimp

We’ve enjoyed the sights of Georgetown so far, learning its history.  For your history lesson today, you’ll be pleased to learn that in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, Georgetown was the wealthiest city in the US, due to their rice agriculture at first, and then due to lumber cutting.  Some owners of large rice plantations had a house on the plantation, another house farther inland, and a third house in New York or Newport RI, long before the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.  In its heyday, it was a major seaport on the Atlantic coast.

In a day or two, we’ll head north to Myrtle Beach to dock the boat for about a week while we drive back to TN.  All this vacationing can be very tiring – and there’s no way to take a vacation from it!

 

 

We haven't had this many gulls since the Gulf Coast