Happy Easter everyone!

The time was right for us to celebrate with an outside hop, so we exited St Simon's Sound on the seemingly endless channel – it took a full 2 hours to go from our anchorage off Lanier Island at St Simons to the waypoint offshore that would put us on a straight tack to Charleston. It was a pleasant night passage with a nice bright moon and lots of stars. We had to motor sail because although the wind was E ( not on the nose for once!) it wasn't strong enough to move us along under sail alone. I'm not complaining though – we’ve spent enough time on overnight passages with too much wind!

We saw surprisingly little boat traffic – a schooner with all sails up just sitting still – maybe practicing heaving to? – a couple of big boats sitting far off the Charleston channel. We had expected more activity around Savannah. And pleasure boats moving north out there? Just little old Madcap. It’s always an eerie feeling to be the only boat in a huge expanse of water. Land was only 20 miles away, but it was out of sight. We have 90 cm (about 3 ft) from our toe rail to the water – so as we sit in the darkness, looking down at the water swooshing by so closely, and high high up at stars overhead, we feel pretty small and vulnerable.

We decided to come in at Charleston and move right along up the ICW to our little anchorage here in the marshes of Dewee’s Creek. Charleston is an interesting city, but we have visited several times before and this time, we just want to keep going. Time will tell if we should have stayed outside till Georgetown, but it felt good to drop the anchor and have a sleep, and right now the wind is up and we are glad to be stopped – 148.8 nautical miles north of where we were 26 hours ago.