Inmate Update #2: ICW to Florida
08 November 1999 | St. Augustine, FL
Greetings from north Florida! It's Monday, November 8, and we crossed into Florida at about 7:45 this morning, having left a lovely anchorage off Cumberland Island at the very bottom of Georgia. Getting there was quite a trip (see "Subject"), but more about that later...
When last we left you we had just crossed the ICW mile marker 100. We're now at about mile 780 in St. Ausustine, FL! It's been a great trip, with some days better than others.
We saw no bears on the "Alligator River-Pungo River Canal"--in fact we didn't see anything living along that stretch, tho it was very interesting scenery. And we did pull into Belhaven (NC) that next day, just before it started to rain. This was a nice little place, with a lovely old inn attached to the marina that had a much-touted all-you-can-eat buffet dinner of southern delicacies. They also had golf carts available to marina guests for running errands in town. One of the things we've found is that many of the marinas have "courtesy cars" available to marina users, which is a BIG help for doing shopping runs since the marinas aren't usually close to the big grocery stores. Often these cars are old rattle traps, but who cares, they run! In this case, tho, they made available licensed golf carts; when we thought we had a break in the rain, we checked one out, got directions and set off to the Food Lion. Which turned out to be quite a ways away. And it started to rain again. And the golf cart didn't seem to go as fast on the road as it did in the marina parking lot (!?). We putted along at what can only be described as a fast walking pace (it sure looks like these things go faster on golf courses!). Jim began to worry that the battery was running down and that he'd need to push us along with his left foot out the side like when you ride a skate board. But we made it, did our shopping, and came out to torrential rain. The trip back was, uh, quite interesting and wet, and made even harrier by big ol' 18 wheelers screaming down the main highway as we tried to stay on the shoulder. It was better when we tacked (turned left) off the main drag because then the rain was at least deflected by the windshield rather than coming sideways and thoroughly soaking us. Just as we got back the rain stopped...
Unfortunately, our cruising buddy Dick had to leave us in Belhaven. We were very sorry to lose him as we'd gotten spoiled by having a third pair of hands on board (and he makes darn good chili!). From there we headed to Beaufort, NC. It was a blustery day, and we were joined for a while by a little yellow finch-looking bird who landed on the deck, appearing to be looking for shelter from the wind. He hopped around for a while, his feathers all askew, positioning himself behind various things on deck to get out of the wind. Eventually he was sufficiently rested or warmed, I guess, because he took off into the wind and didn't come back. We spent a couple of days in the cute little town of Beaufort. The afternoon we arrived we learned from the lady in the 1-chair beauty salon (where I got another shorter than planned "trim") that the high school homecoming parade was at 4 that afternoon! So we found our spot on the street and watched as just about everyone in town passed down the street, including the Future Farmers of America rep, the drama club rep, last year's homecoming queen (never did see this year's?), all the fire trucks in town, the sheriff, chief of police, HS principal and other luminaries, the junior high band (not bad), the senior high band (better) and on and on. It was all quite exciting!! The local maritime museum had courtesy cars available, so the next day we hooked up with 2 other boats (whom we'd met when holed up in Coinjock for Hurricane Irene), piled into the rickety old Jeep Wagoneer (with a very saggy headliner) and did the West Marine, Walmart, Food Lion run in our allotted 2 hours.. We also reconnected here with the boat Bravo Zulu that had been our neighbor in our "home" marina.
One of the other boats on the shopping trip was Suzannah, the couple I mentioned in the last update who had fled Minnesota when Jessie was elected. Not only do they have a boat very similar to ours, but also similar tastes in books, wine, food, and approach to cruising. Starting with our departure from Beaufort (on 10/25) we've been "buddy sailing" with them all the way down (we just parted company this morning). It started with our mutual plans to do a couple of offshore legs, and we both liked the idea of the added comfort (i.e., misery loves company) of doing the trips with another boat. The first leg was a long day-sail from Beaufort to Wrightsville Beach, where we pulled into the anchorage and who should be anchored there but our old Chesapeake Bay sailing buddies, Jane and Dudley on Merhaba!
We left Wrightsville Beach the next morning, headed for Charleston, SC. This was about a 24-hour trip, and was quite lovely. It was warm, the seas calm (read "no wind"), not a cloud in the sky, and we were the ONLY 2 boats out there all day. It was amazing to stand on the deck and see a perfect circle of horizon around you. Several times during the day we were joined by dolphins swimming and jumping along side, or racing along in the bow wake. They were almost close enough to touch. One baby was particularly energetic, circling and leaping while his parents (?) flew along under the bow. They were wonderful visits. That evening, both the sunset and (full) moonrise were spectacular. Between the thick lace of stars and the full moon, you could practically read outside all night. We had an informal watch schedule of 3ish hours, and each of us was able to get a little sleep during the night. We kept in radio contact with Suzannah, but for the most part, it was pretty quiet and dull (those are good features, by the way, for a night passage!).
Early in the morning things started to pick up a little, because we were approaching busy Charleston harbor. (We had planned our departure from Wrightsville Beach to arrive in Charleston after sunrise, a cardinal rule of cruising being never to arrive at night. Sometimes, when wind or currents are better than predicted, you even have to slow down and hang around waiting for sunrise to avoid entering a harbor or anchorage in the dark.) We were right on schedule, headed into the channel with much shipping traffic around us when Suzannah radioed that they thought their engine was about to die. (Ours had died on us a few days earlier, at a very inopportune moment, but Jim changed the fuel filter and it started right back up.) Jim suggested that Don try changing his filter (which he hadn't done before, so Jim talked him thru it), and we circled Suzannah while he worked on it. The engine started up again (so far so good) and we headed back into the channel and into Charleston. Just as we were passing Fort Sumter they radioed again and said they thought it was going to die, but it held on (with very little oomph) and we led the way into the marina, trying to find the shortest route between the various markers to get them in before it quit in an even more inopportune place. We made it in, and upon comparing notes it seems that Don had changed not the fuel filter but the filter for their diesel heater instead. Once he changed the right one, the engine purred happily!
We spent 3 days in Charleston doing boat chores, laundry (cruisers' rule: never pass a "laundry opportunity"), and being tourists. Another cruisers' rule is never to pass a grocery store opportunity, so with our $2 all-day trolley passes in hand, we arranged to end our tourist day at the grocery store with the trolley stop in front. Just as we were coming out of the store, Jim noticed the trolley pulling up, so the four of us grabbed all our goodies and loped across the parking lot to catch it. (It was still better than the golf cart in the rain!).
We left Charleston on the 30th, headed for Beaufort, SC. Within 2 miles of leaving Charleston, headed once again down the ICW, there was a swing bridge we had to go thru. As I think I mentioned in the previous note, there are MANY bridges to negotiate along the ICW, some fixed at a nerve-wracking 65 ft. clearance, but most with some opening mechanism. Of those, some open "on demand" and others have opening restrictions based on the time of day. The restricted openings can be as frequent as every 20 minutes or as long as "on the hour." We timed our departure from Charleston to hit the first bridge at its next "on the hour and half hour" opening, which was a good thing 'cuz there was a serious current swirling thru the not-very-big area where we would have to wait had we missed it. The next one was 9 miles up the stream, with the same restrictions. As we pulled up toward it, we heard the bridge tender say over the radio that there was some maintenance work being done on the bridge and that they'd open as soon as they could (???). By now there were several boats waiting, a few of which had dropped their anchors. We chose the optimistic approach and circled for about 40 minutes, figuring that the minute we dropped the hook the bridge would start to go up. And indeed, the bridge tender came over the radio and said they were going to do a test opening so if you wanted to go, now was the time to do it. By not being anchored, we were able to scurry thru the opening, which turned out to be brief, and we heard later on a Coast Guard radio announcement that the bridge would only open every 4 hours, and then "not until further notice." Whew!
The rest of the day was uneventful, and we anchored that night on a pretty creek (albeit not far from a mud flat that had another boat aground in the morning). But the next day was not a good one. First, the "chance of showers" that wasn't due for another 24 hours showed up early. Then Jim cut a mark a little too close and we were hard aground. (Everything written about traveling the ICW says "when, not if, you go aground..." but we were bound and determined to prove them wrong. So much for that.) This time Suzannah circled in deep water while we put out a sail to heel us over, moved Katie and the boom to port to shift weight that way, and wiggled off the mud with the help of a rising tide. Then, after successfully passing thru a narrow "land cut" and just as we were coming around into more open water, two in-a-hurry power boats came roaring by us, throwing a wake like we'd never seen and rocking us so that the sandwiches I'd just made went flying across the galley. Within the limits of radio etiquette we yelled at them, and learned later via the radio that they had been "waking" people all day and at least one other boat was going to report them to the Coast Guard.
[In addition to radio etiquette, there's also a "passing" etiquette on the ICW (Miss Manners would be proud!). For the most part, the channels are very narrow, and often very shallow (!). Sail boats don't have a lot of option but to stay in the middle of the channel, but we move too slow for most power boaters and they want to pass us. The etiquette is either for the power boat to radio the sail boat and alert them that they intend to pass port or starboard, then throttle way back as they pass to minimize the wake, or, just to throttle back and pass (without the radio call). The sail boat also throttles back and then turns into what (little) wake the power boat generates. For the most part this works pretty well, minimizing the roll we experience, but every once in a while a real bozo goes by and turns us on our ears. Little wonder there continues to be little love lost between sail and power boaters.]
We finally arrived in Beaufort, anchored, and immediately were swarmed with bazillions of no-see-ums. They were so thick you breathed them in... The day's final straw came when we were trying to launch the dinghy to be able to go into town and Jim couldn't find the fuel hose. I won't bore you with the details of the ultimately successful search, but Jim was not a happy boater. As I said, a long day was had by all... And then we listened to the weather report that said we could expect a major blow the next day, with winds possibly gusting to 60 knots!
Given that prediction, we moved from the anchorage to the marina; and, while it got pretty windy, it wasn't too bad. We liked this Beaufort (pronounced BYEW-fort) better than its North Carolina counterpart (pronounced BOE-fort, thank you very much). It had a charming historic district with wonderful old houses surrounded by enormous live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, all oozing "southern." We had a good laundry opportunity here, good restaurants, 2 good book stores, and a great wine store that would drive boaters back to the marina with their (heavy) bounty.
From Beaufort it was an uneventful day's ride to Savannah, GA, where once again we did the tourist thing, including a horse-drawn carriage ride thru the historic district and an after dusk "ghost" walking tour (Sue on Suzannah has a friend in Minneapolis who's real life ghost buster!). According to our guide, Savannah is one of the most active spirit places in the country (?!?). Both tours got a lot of mileage out of the book and movie, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." Seems that book has proven to be a major revitalizing force for previously floundering Savannah. Seems they get a lot of mileage out of movies being filmed there. We were shown several "Forest Gump" locations, and while we were there, the center of town was all a-buzz with the filming of a new movie, "The Legend of Bagger Vance" (some golf guy back in the early 1930s), directed by Robert Redford and starring (ta-dum) Matt Damon and Will Smith. (Sue and I did agree it was worth getting a glimpse of Robert Redford...)
From Savannah our plan was to go off shore again to bypass the Georgia section of the ICW (which mostly weaves east/west rather than the desired south). The weather forecast was good (if chilly), and we figured that if we left early afternoon (11/5), we'd get to the channel leading to Cumberland Island, GA (our next destination) by sunrise. We set out with a good current behind us and made it to the Savannah River outlet (i.e., where it meets the ocean) in good time. But as we moved into the open ocean, the seas grew very choppy and as the afternoon and evening wore on, the wind picked up (directly behind us) more than predicted. The combination of wind and relatively shallow water (we were never deeper than about 65 ft.) made for extremely choppy/rolly seas and a very uncomfortable night. The only way I can think of to describe it is, imagine putting your house in a washing machine. Whatever can move, moved; whatever could rattle rattled; whatever could roll rolled; whatever could squeak squeaked; whatever could... well, you get the idea. Every dish towel we have on board was wedged between something. Sleeping was almost impossible because you risked being thrown out of the berth (I haven't had time to make the lee cloth yet...). At one point, when I was on watch and Jim was trying to sleep, I shined the flashlight on the heel-o-meter (it's actually called an inclinometer, telling you how far over you've heeled) when we were in one of the thrashing about cycles. They started with a roll of 10 degrees each way, then to 20, and then to 25. Then it would settle down, and you'd get a few minutes of relative steadiness, and then it would start all over again: rollllll to the right, rollllll to the left. Even tho we thought things below were pretty well stowed, the boat was a shambles by morning, with everything seeking its own level. The easiest thing to do at that point is just to leave things where they lie. The good part? It wasn't too cold and the stars were incredible, so thick there was hardly any black space between them and a bunch of them chose that night for shooting.
We pulled into the St. Mary's River inlet and turned into a beautiful anchorage at Cumberland Island (off the south Georgia coast, just a breath above the FL state line) at about 9:30, with our fillings practically shaken out, the floor laden with stuff, and pretty tired, but otherwise all was well. A nap helped.
I had forgotten that Cumberland Is. was where JFK, Jr. had his very private/secret wedding. It's a beautiful island with an interesting mix of expansive, fine-sand beaches and "marine forests" full of enormous Spanish-moss covered live oaks and something between a fern and a palm tree everywhere under them. In our 8-mile hike up beach and thru forests we saw armadillos rooting in the underbrush, the ruins of an incredible 1920's Carnegie family mansion, a huge (tho unfortunately dead) logger-head turtle, wild horses on the beach, and all nature of birds.
And with that, you're up to date. We left Cumberland Is. this morning, headed for St. Augustine, FL, where we dropped anchor at 5:00 PM. Our wonderful cruising partners on Suzannah headed north briefly to hook up with friends from Minn., but our paths will cross again eventually. Hardly a day passes that we don't see dolphins loping thru the anchorage or dashing along in our boat wake. The weather has warmed up noticeably (we're back to shorts and T-shirts), and there are palm trees everywhere. This is good.
We'll continue pushing south over the next few days. Current plan is to head to the Bahamas around 11/20. Stay tuned...