Savannah, GA

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Savannah is located on the Savannah River and there are no Marinas per se,  we had to tie up at either the city dock which had no bathrooms or showers or bite the bullet and pay 25 cents extra a foot and tie up at the Hyatt Regency. Well we enjoyed our time there, the workout facilities with their gorgeous showers saw much use and we lounged about tin the lobby using their Wifi quite frequently. We tied up at the dock next to the biggest, most beautiful sailboat I have ever seen. 

We are in Georgia, the land of peaches and peanuts. The Savannah we encountered is a fine old city with much of the downtown area set aside as a National Landmark. We took a walking tour of the area and our guide was a wealth of information.  The founder of the city a man named Oglethorpe laid out the city with parks every two blocks, the green spaces are beautifully kept up and the large overhanging live oaks offer a canopy of shade for the residents. 

There were stunning examples of architecture throughout the tour, enhance by the explanations the guide offered us. Savannah has an art and design college, when they started they began buying up the old building in the downtown core and allowing it's students to have a hands on learnng environment while restoration of the buildings took place, everywhere we looked we saw the SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design logo.  The institution has been in large part responsible for the revitalization of the inner city. We stopped in at one of their museums and saw an incredible display of hand died, cut paper, it was amazing. 

We visited the Catholic Cathedral in town, it was beautiful with it's massive pipe organ, and unusual poinsettia Christmas tree. 

 Savannah is located on a 40 foot high bluff above the river. There are three story buildings all along the river and most have touristy shops on all three floors. Here I am on the second floor on the back side of the building, the street is still cobblestone. The old steps are about twice as long as normal so you have to take very large strides going up. 

We passed a millenary establishment and while I restrained myself from going in, I thought I might not be able to resist, I do have evidence of their beautiful creations. 

We have decided to go offshore through the rest of Georgia so at the moment are sailing along towards St. Mary's Inlet at the Georgia/Florida border. It should be about a 24 hour sail, it feels good to be away from those nasty shoaling cuts between rivers in the ICW although I may have to reacquire my sea legs. 

Beaufort and Hilton Head SC

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We spent the afternoon in Beaufort SC. Don't get confused this is not Beaufort NC, very easily distinguished because of the way they are pronounce. In NC they say Bowfurt, in SC it is pronounce Bewfurt, now you know!!  Well, Bewfurt is lovely with Spanish Moss hanging from the tree everywhere. The bigger houses along the river have been restored with the help of funds from the National Hisotic Trust.  

Apparently after the movie Gone with the Wind came out, a lot of columns were added to homes to imitate the fictional Tara. I was at a book store and picked up a second hand copy of Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece and am currently immersed in it. 

We headed down to Hilton Head yesterday.  It has been developed since the 1930's when a bridge was built to the mainland.  The huge homes along the river are new and the architecture is fun to critique. We motored about 2m up the river to anchor so we could go into town and found quite a few derelict boats in the area. 

How sad.  There was another which was listed over in the weeds.  When we asked about it we were told that the owner did not pay his Marina bills so they towed it into swamp, threw out the anchor and left it.  A few days later it was floating free on a very high tide, so they towed it to a different spot, at low tide it was completely out of the water, it will some tow job to get it fom it's resting place. Hilton Head is know for it's golf courses, there are 20 in the area and a PGA event takes place here.  It is a big island and very spread out so we did not get a chance to see much.  I was on a mission to get some new cockpit cushions and we took a cab to Walmart to see if they had any. They didn't but the parking lot was a surprise. 

Imagine, that is a Walmart parking lot!!!  There are strict ordinances on the island about signage and maintenance of the rural feel of the area, they have done a great job. 

Sailing Info.

We are using "The Intracoastal Waterway, Norfolk to Miami, A Cockpit Cruising Handbook" by Jan and Bill Moeller. It is a small guide with few pictures and has references to bridges, anchorages and marinas by the mile number along the waterway. We just purchased the Waterway Guide, Atlantic ICW, Intracostal Waterway, Norfolk VA to Jacksonville Fl, published by Waterway Guide Media.  It is a great guide, with introductions to cities along the way, plus it is updated yearly about conditions on the waterway.  It is sponsored by Marinas, etc. but also mentions anchorages and their pluses and minuses. 

South Edisto River, SC   32*33.2 N X 80*25.3 W

Anchored in 4m with very good holding.

Protection to the NE but very open from the E

No services. Good place to stop to wait for high tide for next cuts. 

Beaufort, SC   32*25.7 N X 80*40.5 W

We rented a mooring at the Downtown City Marina. 

Great deal, $20/day, free courtesy car for 1 hour, very strict, showers, laundry.

Groceries and a KMart by car and downtown within close walking distance.

A lovely town with lots of wonderful history, well worth a stop.

Hilton Head Island - Broad Creek SC  32*10.7 N X 80*46.6 W

Anchored in the river in 5m, anchored dragged first time, reset and let out more chain. 

Palmetto Marina let us live our dinghy there for free. 

Had to take taxis for any services, except fuel. 

Not a stop I would recommend, unless you rent a car or bicycle. 

Be mindful of the tide when you anchor. 

Savannah, GA  32*05.0 N X 81*05.5 W

Stayed at the Hyatt Regency Dock on the Savannah River. 

$3/ft, includes electricity and use of hotel facilities, workout room with showers and pool, ice machine. 

Worth the stay, great access to historic downtown Savannah. Great stop 

Five Fathom Creek, GA  32*05.1N X 81*02.2 W

Located about 1 1/2 m downriver from Savannah, anchored in 7m, very good holding. 

Just off the Savannah River, big tankers go by. 

No services, just across from Fort Jackson which looks like a interesting spot to visit. 

Not much protection. We did not want to go through another cut in ICW to more protected spot because we had no knowledge of cuts. 

Christmas in Charleston

Well not quite but they had a parade of boats last night and we had met some people on the dock so we had an impromptu Christmas party.  We sat on a boat that was registered in Iqualuit of all places (they are from Montreal, never been to Iqualuit, a tax dodge) and drank wine and honked their air horn at the boats with gorgeous displays.  We ended up on our boat, we fed a single handed rocket scientist, and then the other boat joined us for Christmas cake, shortbread and rum balls.  The fellow from Montreal kept saying he loved my balls. It was great to have a celebration with interesting new friends. 

We had a whirlwind trip around Charleston and the weather was absolutely beautiful  This is one of the first things we saw and I thought it was such a great idea. Then we indulged in some good southern cooking, I had ribs with collard greens and Barry had shrimp and grits and we each ate half of each place, both were delicious.  That evening we went out to a musical history of the City of Charleston.  It was very well done with the music from before the American Revolutionthe Civil War and some spirituals which the African Americans sang to give messages about the Underground Railroad.  I really loved their rendition of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and ending with a super piano duet of Gershin's Rhapsody in Blue.  

                                          A 13 inch Civil War mortar, huge. 

Yesterday we borrowed some bicycles and cycled through the South of Broad area of Charleston.  There are beautiful homes with outstanding wrought iron work, we were told that some of it dates way back, if the work was good if the house fell apart, people would take the iron work and put it on a new home. We visited the free exhibit about Fort Sumter. It had an excellent display about the conditions leading up to South Carolina being the first state to secede from the U.S.  The first shots of the Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter.  Charleston was blockaded and was under fire from Union positions on small islands in the harbor and ships.  It was bombarded for over 500 days, at the end people were starving and the city was in ruins. One church was rebuilt from the bricks of the former building on the same space.  Charleston has had every disaster hit it, the great fire, an earthquake, the bombardment during the civil war and Hurriicane Hugo in 1989, one of the worst to hit the east coast. It is quite the city!!

Check out the wrought iron balconies! The side porches on the pink building wer built that way to catch the ocean breezes. Someone decided to liven up the town by painting her house in the pastel colours popular in the Caribbean islands and it caught on. 

                            What a beauty, I think it's some kind of a roadster. 

                             Aren't the Christmas decorations on this tree great! 

Charleston, SC

                                    

We arrived in Charleston, before noon today, having spent last night a frustrating 12nm north waiting for high tide.  There was a particularly bad patch just before we entered the James River so we anchored at 1020 hours yesterday morning with me wishing we had tried to negotiate the bad stuff.  NOW, I am really glad we didn't.  This couple we met about a week ago tried to come down that stretch and had to get towed off when they went aground.  The tow boat pulled them so hard that their steering gave out,  something went wrong with the hydraulics, so once they were off the sandbar, they had to be towed the 10 miles into Charleston and now they have to hauled out.  Whew, glad we waited. 

They were conducting dredging operations in the channel, where the really bad stuff is. It was wild coming up to the thing.  The driver was going back and forth across the channel sucking up the sand, remember this is in the very shallow part.  The guy on deck motions us to come forward and get as close to him as possible. As Barry is inching forward (I always get him to navigate the really tricky bits) the dredge swings across in front of us, Barry just had to keep going and the dredge swung back so we could get by him. I swear we were within 5 ft of the machine, talk about nerve wracking. 

Here are some random shots taken in the last few days. 

                                A place all by itself, out in the middle of a swampy grassland.  

                         A crazy looking craft, Barry figured they built docks??

   A cormorant drying his wings, they have no waterproofing like ducks so they stretch them out to dry 

                                  This is what it is all about for these guys!

Georgetown, South Carolina

We stopped for a day and a half at this lovely town.  The county once was the rice capital of North America. With 6 rivers in the area and a tidal flow up the rivers, rice was a commodity that could be easily grown. 

It is the south so slaves were the work force of the area before the Civil War.  The county was covered in cypress swamps so the land had to be cleared and then levelled and channels built in the fields so that they could be flooded.  A system of flood gates would be built next to the river access where they could control the water that entered, if salt water got into the crop it would be ruined.  It often took 15 years from the time land was acquired until a crop could be harvested.  Plantations owners would house the slaves on their property and have a home there, a home in Georgetown where they would conduct their business, and a vacation home on Pawley's Island.  After the Civil War, the rice continued to be grown, profits diminishing because they had to pay their labour force.  The crop was being more widely planted in the U.S. and once mechanization reached the industry the Carolina rice industry was doomed.  The fields here were too wet, so that machines could not do the harvesting.  By the 1930's rice was no longer grown here on a commercial basis.  Lumbering and steel manufacturing replaced rice as the dominate industries in the area. Georgetown count was the second richest county in the country at one time. 

We visited the Kaminski house, which was given to the city of Georgetown in the 1950's, with all the furniture intact.  The former owners toured the world and there are exquisite examples of antique furnishings throughout the house. The Kaminski family immigrated to this area to escape the Prussian conscription and made a very good living as a merchant in town. He was Jewish and she was Episcipalian so her family was not happy with the marriage. 

The guest bedroom. 

I just loved this outfit, the styling the colour and the shoes and purse which is hard for you to see. 

This piece of furniture was for the ladies when making their tea.  The boxy area at the top contained jars of tea and you would blend the different types to suit your palette, then it would be wheeled to the next lady. A kettle was by the fireplace to fill your cup after you had finished blending, my Great Aunt Laura would have loved this item. 

This is the library with a picture of Henry Kaminski, he was in the reserves between the wars and volunteered for WWII when he was in his forties. He actually was the officer is charge the day Pearl Harbour was bombed.  He was portrayed in the movie Tora Tora Tora, on the telephone trying to let everyone know what was going on! 

We visited the Maritime Museum and were very interested in the pictures and models of the paddle wheelers that plied these rivers carrying people and cargo. There was a story of one African American steam boat captain that took a stern wheeler that was fighting for the Confederate Army and piloted it out the river, through the Union blockade, with families and other slaves onboard, and surrendered to the enemy.  He ended up as the captain of the vessel, which was eventually sunk during the fighting. 

We strolled around town and took in the beautiful homes that have been exquisitely restored or maintained.  The gardens really appealed to me, the bottom picture is off a black oak, the growth on the branches has just came back to life because of the recent rains.  We were told that it can die off and come back to life four or five times a year depending on the amount of rain.  The streets are wide and stately with trees overhanging them. Barry wondered aloud how many times the power goes out when it storms because in one spot we saw the power lines bowing to a dangerous degree due to tree branches leaning on them.  

Did I tell you how friendly everyone is here?  Everyone greets you, the shop keepers ask where you are from, and yesterday this elderly gentleman saw us walking back from the grocery store and turned around, held up traffic while we got in his truck and regaled us with tales as he drove us back to our dinghy, how lovely!  

If you live around here and enjoy hunting and fishing you have a boat like this with a very flat bottom.  They go zipping by us with great regularity full of fellows in camouflage gear.  We saw one guy, drive into the reeds by the bank and clamour ashore and then walk down the bank with his shotgun or rifle over his shoulder.  If I were a duck I would avoid this area.  This morning I saw a golden eagle perched in a tree and several blue jays fluttering across the ICW. There are lots of cormorants and herons here as well. I have only seen two ducks and they (very smartly) were in a conservation area. 

We are currently anchored at the confluence of several waterways in a spot called Five Fathom Creek.  We did not go very far today but the next stretch requires us to have mid to high tide so we will leave as soon as it is light enough to see in the morning. We should be in Charleston tomorrow night. 

Sailing Info.

We are using "The Intracoastal Waterway, Norfolk to Miami, A Cockpit Cruising Handbook" by Jan and Bill Moeller. It is a small guide with few pictures and has references to bridges, anchorages and marinas by the mile number along the waterway. We just purchased the Waterway Guide, Atlantic ICW, Intracostal Waterway, Norfolk VA to Jacksonville Fl, published by Waterway Guide Media.  It is a great guide, with introductions to cities along the way, plus it is updated yearly about conditions on the waterway.  It is sponsored by Marinas, etc. but also mentions anchorages and their pluses and minuses. 

Georgetown     33*21.8 N  X  79*16.9 W

Anchored just outside the channel opposite Harbourview Marina, very good holding in soft mud

Boats were on moorings so we were lucky to find a spot open with room between. 

Take care on position of anchor it can shallow up quickly. Did a 180 with the tide.

Docked the dinghy at the city docks, Marina were kind enough to let us use the laundry, great stop. 

Groceries about a 2 mile walk from harbour, someone stopped on street to give us a ride back.

Five Fathom Creek    33*03.95 N  X  79*24.9 W

Anchored in 5m of water, very good holding, little protection

Anchorage is mentioned to be further up the creek but it was shallowing quickly so we turned around and anchored I the main channel off to the side. 

Lots of fishing trawlers, shrimpers?? working these waters. No info on services, settlement within dinghy distance

Anchored to wait for high tide on nest stretch of ICW

Dewees Creek    33*50.0 N  X  79*45.0 W

Anchored in 7m at mid to low tide. Excellent holding, no protection, open to ocean from east.

Very fast current, no services, lots of birds. 

Anchored to wait for high tide on nest stretch of ICW

Entering South Carolina

K We have been making steady progress south and although I am still wearing my fleece pants, it has been warming up during the days. This section of the ICW parallels the Atlantic Ocean.

               These are newer cookie cutter homes with the very popular "widow's walk". 

                                           A widow's walk with outdoor stairs

                                              The traditional widow's walk. 

 We have had occaisions where there are houses on the west side of the ICW and on the east side there was a sand bank, a swampy bit of water and then rows and rows of homes packed together facing the ocean. In some places the houses on the ICW have docks that are almost as wide as the "ditch". 

   An opening to the Atlantic, we are now in the area where there are tidal issues to deal with.  The currents rush in and out of these openings so you will have the current against you approaching the opening and once you cross it the tide with be with you!  Going across the openings you have to adjust for the push or pull of the current and crab sideways across the opening.  Since it is so shallow and sandy in most of this area, shoaling is a big issue, so one must be extremely diligent in paying attention to where you are and not necessarily believing the water depths published on the chart. 

We passed through Camp Lejuene the other day and we stopped for 90 minutes while they conducted  a live firing exercise. There was a lot of BOOMING, and rat a tat tatting, and then they stopped and we got to transit the firing range. 

         This target looks pretty beat up, I would not care to walk in those dunes. 

We stopped in Southport, NC for our weekly laundry run and hot running showers.  After we tied up the fellow informed us that the water was off and we could not shower or do the laundry, that was the bad news, the good news was we got to stay for free:)  It ended up being a lovely stop, we walked along the waterfront and saw the very well kept historic homes there, mostly built in the late 1800's. 

One house had the most marvellous display of blow up Christmas decorations, I had ever seen. 

With true southern style, the waterfront park had swinging benches and the museums had rocking chairs out front. 

We just past through the Myrtle Beach area, it apparently has 120 golf courses in the area.  

We would be in trouble on this course, way toooooo close to the water. 

This gondola style lift is to take the duffers from one side of the ICW where they park their cars to the other side, where the golf course it.  There were signs for the shark exhibit in an aquarium so probably more than just the golf course to travel back and forth across for!!

Sailing Info.

We are using "The Intracoastal Waterway, Norfolk to Miami, A Cockpit Cruising Handbook" by Jan and Bill Moeller. It is a small guide with few pictures and has references to bridges, anchorages and marinas by the mile number along the waterway. We just purchased the Waterway Guide, Atlantic ICW, Intracostal Waterway, Norfolk VA to Jacksonville Fl, published by Waterway Guide Media.  It is a great guide, with introductions to cities along the way, plus it is updated yearly about conditions on the waterway.  It is sponsored by Marinas, etc. But also mentions anchorages and their pluses and minuses. 

Southport Marina    33*55.1 N  X  78*01.7 W

Very helpful with docking, nice facilities

Water was off in showers and laundry so we got to stay for free, otherwise $2.00/ft

Hank a retired meteorologist gives a free info. session every night during the boat migration season, he gives a weather forecast and a handout on all the bad spots from Southport to Savannahon the ICW It was super.  He also runs a yacht care business and drives cruisers around for $15 a round trip. 

Calabash Creek    33*52.4N  X  78*34.2  W

Anchored in 4 m of water at half tide. Good holding, good protection

No services nearby

Do not anchor at south entrance to the creek, shoaling badly. 

Prince Creek off the Waccamaw Rivee  33*35.8 N  X 79*04.95

Anchored in 7m of water in small creek with strong current

Very Good holding and great protection

Short scoped ourselves a little because the creek was very narrow, no problem, did swing close to east bank but did not go aground.  More water on the east side. 

Christmas Baking

I have discovered in the past few years that Barry is not really keen on Christmas.  When I suggested it was time to bake my Christmas cakes this year, he commented that we could just buy them.  I was affronted, I don't think any mass produced cake can compete with my mother's recipie. Then yesterday I decided to make the traditional shortbread cookies I always bake.  Trying to get Barry into the swing of things, I asked which cookie cutter I should use the most and he just grunted, when I pushed he said the smallest. When the cookies were cut I asked him to help cut the cherries. He said forget the cherries, don't you just pick them off and throw them away, no, I replied, do you. He reluctantly admitted that he ate the cherries. By the time I got to the end of the dough I decided to bake Barry his own special Christmas cookie.