Perseverance2

We were able to follow our plan and arrived in Charleston at approximately 9:30AM on Monday, October 28. Overnights cut travel times but, for us, are stressing because you are moving in the dark. Instead of stopping in Charleston, we jumped right back onto the ICW and headed south until fatigue said to stop. We picked a very quiet creek (in South Carolina that means a strip of water between two marshes), and commented how it looked like some place else we had anchored. No wonder....our log showed we had anchored in almost the exact same spot in the spring of 2012! Duh!
Onward south, pulling into Port Royal Landing Marina just south of Beaufort, SC, on Tuesday. After looking at weather forecasts, we cut short our planned stay and left Wednesday late morning, planning to go down the Beaufort River, and out at Port Royal, heading for Fernandina Beach, FL. Those plans were cut short quickly and we diverted by the ICW down to Hilton Head, where after a night in a marina, a local boatyard was able to look at a problem, saying there was no problem. So we quickly pulled out of there at approximately 8AM, having decided to try another outside leg - out at Calibogue Sound and in at St. Catherine’s or Doboy. Which we did, but changed our destination from Doboy to St. Simon’s Sound, even further south. We succeeded, but after entering a well-lit St. Simons channel, we had to negotiate non-lit daymarks in the dark to an anchorage in Lanier Creek (the spotlight helped, along with 3 sets of chart to watch). When we woke up the next morning, Friday, there was another boat anchored next to us, obviously having arrived sometime after we did - so we were not the only fools out there! Friday we stayed inside and arrived in Fernandina Beach around 2:30PM. For us, it is quite an achievement to be in Florida on November 1.
Dinner with friends from another boat, Tom & Sandy of Anania, at one of our favorite restaurants (it was also Tom S.’s birthday). Rain during the night and the beginning of this morning. We have decided to stay put for at least one more day, then we will head south on the ICW since the weather will make the outside much too rollicking for us.