A long day but we made progress.
18 December 2009 • Osprey Marina,SC
We seem to be collecting nice marinas on this trip. I am writing this from the dock at the Osprey Marina just south of Myrtle Beach and what a great place - $1/ft, $5 for electricity, a very nice inexpensive grill on the dock, clean restrooms and showers, very sheltered docks, a laundromat with an ironing board, a goodie bag containing: grill menu, newsletter, list of restaurants and taxi phone numbers, beer coozie, security whistle and floater, a pen, wrapped peppermints, matches, two honey buns, sleeve of water biscuits, and a 10 oz block of Kraft cracker barrel cheddar cheese, and apost card, etc. this is great! If the weather stays crappy tomorrow we'll just stay here for another day.
We got up at 05h30 to have breakfast, walk Peri and do the first parade on the engine and were able to get away from the dock to get through the Oak Island Bridge construction before they started work in the morning at 07h30. Our timing couldn't have been better as we hit all the shallow spots right at high tide and breezed through without even slowing down. We were also very fortunate in that there were two other boats with us on the trip today No Agenda, Nelleke and then Further. No Agenda was faster and always got to the bridges first and got them to wait until the other two of us arrived and we responded by telling them about this marina and here we all are weathering out the weather.
We got to South Carolina by 10h30 and told ourselves that we were warmer because we were someplace where it has South in the name. As we progressed further into SC we were struck by two things: the number of sunken boats (most of them power boats) along the waterway, and how much flooding there is here. The water level has to be a good three feet higher than normal and we saw many places with back doors that opened into the river instead of a back yard, acres of flooded forest, and many fixed docks that were underwater. I had originally thought that it was a sort of storm surge but as we cleared the last bridge I asked the Bridgemaster how long the flooding had been here and he mentioned that it had been going on for five weeks! I can only imagine the damage that must have been caused.
Tomorrow we will decide whether to stay here or head on to Georgetown and then on Sunday decide whether we will head offshore to Fernandina or continue to Beauford or not.
Comments