Christmas Aboard

Christmas Day found us docked in lovely Georgetown, South Carolina. Our miniature Christmas tree was adorned with sand dollars and miniature crab buoys and topped with a starfish. We somehow scraped together enough presents given the limited shopping opportunities to surprise Amelia.

Georgetown is a pretty southern town, with a mix of antebellum mansions and shotgun houses, as well as a couple of pre-revolutionary war homes. It is interesting to experience the contrasts inherent in a historic port – shrimp boats docked next to restaurants, boutiques and a downtown harborside boardwalk with a view of the steel mill a few blocks away. The harbor, too, is home to contrasts with an assortment of liveaboard boats that range from traditional craft to funky home-made. We arrived after a couple of days in Myrtle Beach, where we checked into a marina at a fancy resort so that we could have fun poolside and celebrate Carole’s birthday.

The trip from Myrtle Beach to Georgetown down the ICW was beautiful. This stretch has a reputation of being the most scenic on the waterway, with overhanging live oaks and Spanish moss. It is also very isolated – we went for hours without seeing a single person, car or home, and did not see any other boats at all during our daylong journey. We’ve heard reports of heavy snow in Boston, so it is nice to be experiencing warmer holiday temperatures as we prepare to continue our journey south.

As we celebrate Christmas, we are thankful for our family and friends. Best wishes to all for a wonderful holiday and peace in the New Year.

Our Newest Crewmember

As we travel down The Ditch, we decided that we needed a little help keeping track of our position. After several hours of travel, with one buoy looking just like the next and and ever-changing but consistent rows of houses, docks, sand dunes and trees, it is easy to forget where we are on the chart. Accordingly, we enlisted, or should we say Shanghaied, one of Amelia's toys named "Meat" (yes, an odd name, particularly when the namer is a vegetarian six year old.) Meat is a two-inch tall meat-eating dinosour who now moves accross the chart each time we pass a navigational aid (buoy, day mark, turn, etc.).

Thanks to Meat we know know where we are on the chart at all times. Now if Meat could only tell us where the US Corp of Engineers has neglected to maintain the ICW water depth at more than six feet. This would enable us to avoid running aground when the chart says the water should be deeper, as we did leaving Oriental and three times yesterday. We had hoped that buying unlimited towing insurance would mean that we would not need to use it. We were wrong. Perhaps forward-looking sonar should go on Dave's Christmas list.

We are now in Southport NC, near Cape Fear. Southport is famous in Civil War history for being one of the few ports that the Union blockades could not keep closed, foiled by the tenacity and skill of local blockade runners (known locally as shoal runners). We will try to follow their good example and avoid runing aground (again) on the ever shifting Cape Fear shoals as we cross the border into South Carolina tomorrow, provided the weather cooperates, with the goal of Charleston by Christmas, or maybe New Year's Eve.

The Town Dock – Oriental, NC

We are waiting out a rainy weekend in Oriental, NC. Oriental is a friendly little town on the Pamlico Sound with 3,000 boat slips and only 850 permanent residents according to the experts at local coffee shop, The Bean. On The Bean’s front porch, the locals have an excellent view of transient boaters attempting to land and tie up at the Town Dock and the marina across the street. There, they rate the navigational abilities of arriving boaters using Olympic-style placards. As you can see, we got an average score of 4.7 (out of 10) but hope to do better upon departure.

Oriental has a fascinating website www.towndock.net which has a harbor webcam. In the current HarborCam, Serendipity’s mast is visible on the left behind the low building in the foreground (The Bean).

Over the past week we made good time motoring down The Ditch except for two nights and an entire day spent at anchor on the Little Alligator River waiting for dense fog to lift. The fog had not been predicted and we awoke at 5:30 AM to be ready to weigh anchor and set out at first light in order to cover the maximum distance during daylight and arrive at our planned destination before dark. As it gradually got lighter, we realized that we were in fog so thick that we couldn’t see more than a few yards from the boat. We spent the entire day expecting the fog to lift any minute and regularly adjusting downward our travel expectations. About 2:00 PM we finally realized that we would be staying at anchor for another night and relaxed. A good reminder to pick our anchor locations well.

One of the interesting challenges of traversing the ICW is dealing with the many lift and swing bridges along the way, as well as some locks, each with its own schedule. After going through the Alligator River Bridge we heard many complaints on the radio that the bridge had just closed (right after we were through), apparently for at least a day, for repairs. It underscored the importance of schedule flexibility when traveling by boat.

The canal down the Alligator River has been another eye-opener. While the canal itself is wide, the sides are shallow and littered with tree stumps and debris so the navigable portion is very narrow – in places potentially too narrow for two boats to pass. We were worried the entire time about running into one of the wide river barges that routinely use the ICW going in the opposite direction. In fact, the canal had us so spooked that when Dave lost his favorite hat to a wind gust, we didn’t even think about turning the boat around in the narrow channel to retrieve it. The area is quite beautiful and much more rural than expected but very remote. No cell phone access for three days was quite a surprise!

We expect to leave Oriental tomorrow to continue to Beaufort NC to pick up our mail and then continue south. In the meantime, we have some time to prepare to try to improve our docking score for the regulars on The Bean’s front porch.

Digging "The Ditch"

After leaving Annapolis last weekend, we had a brisk and boisterous sail down the Chesapeake Bay, with winds gusting to 35 knots, 8- to 10-foot seas and temperatures in the 30’s. We stopped over in Deltaville (running aground on entry and on exit) and had to chip ice off the cockpit cushions each morning. Then we ran aground entering the harbor at Hampton, just north of Norfolk.

We have finally made it into the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), and are finally experiencing some sunny, warm weather with temperatures in the 60s. We had a fascinating trip through Norfolk VA (seeing all kinds of naval and commercial boats) and since have experienced a lot more nature as we wend our way down “The Ditch” as the ICW is called. Today we saw a lot of birds including a bald eagle. We stopped over in Great Bridge VA last night and are now in Coinjack, North Carolina, poised to continue south tomorrow to take advantage of the fair weather.

We celebrated Dave’s birthday yesterday and I am finally getting the hang of baking a cake which is more or less level (thanks in part to a little modification I made to the oven). Amelia is having a blast and we are enjoying being underway.