Charleson, South Carolina

We arrived here late in the afternoon of Wednesday, May 16, and left at 6:30 am the following Wednesday. Our first two days here were enjoyed in getting to know our new friends, the ones of “Autumn Borne” who had helped us here on our way from Beaufort, Dean and Susan. See autumnborne.blogspot.com.

They have lived aboard for about five years on their CSY 44. They keep her in the Hudson, near Albany, to be close to family, during the summers. Dean is a Vietnam Vet who did heavy combat duty there, and thus hates war, a musician and a mechanical engineer with a lot of experience in engineering big projects. Susan did IT for a College up in Buffalo. They have been bikers and done a lot of things in their 42 year marriage, so far.They are fun people to be with.

They anchored in the Ashley River near the big marina there and we docked at the Charleston Maritime Center in the Cooper River.  ILENE is almost hidden behind the big schooner next to it but recognizable only by her double head stay. The marina office is on second floor of white building background right. Aquarium, Ft. Sumter ferry and Patriot Point ferry are all off to the right.

A manatee swam under our dock:

The city is the peninsula of land at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, bearing the first and last names of an early local hero. Its tip, called The Battery, is like the Battery in Manhattan, except this battery has cannons.

The city has since expanded north and onto the opposite shores of the rivers.  The street connecting our two locations is, what else, Calhoon St. Dean and Susan walked its length over to us for mango pancakes our first day here and stayed through lunch, meanwhile helping me fix the fuel problem we had had during the trip. We agreed to go to the movies the next day and walked to their marina and cabbed to the movies to see “Salmon Fishing in The Yemen” which was charming, and “The Dictator” which was coarse, crude and puerile, except for a great speech at the end.

We did a day of cleaning and blogging and then on to sightseeing. There is an expensive ferry to take folks to Fort Sumter.

 

The fort is run by the National Park Service and admission is free, with an excellent NPS docent.  

It has a museum relating to the causes of the Civil War at the City end of the ferry landing, and another in the fort dealing with military aspects. The fort was built on an underwater shoal, by dumping lots of stone on that shoal.

It was built, one of 42 such forts, erected in the aftermath of the War of 1812, when our cities has been bombarded by the British. It is a small portion of its former self, that portion having been preserved by the debris falling onto it in the process of the North’s seige and bombarding it when retaking it late in the war. The first shots were fired after the northern commander had refused a demand for surrender. He surrendered only after the wooden structures were set afire, threatening the magazine and his reinforcement ship had turned back when fired upon while approaching. He and his men were permitted to lower and take their flag with them and were sent back to New York rather than taken as prisoners of war. When the North retook the fort, there was no surrender, just a withdrawal by the south.

The bridge across the Cooper River is quite beautiful, don’t you think?

The aircraft carrier Yorktown CV-10 and  the destroyer Laffey  DD-724

 

both served in WWII and are now at Patriots Point, across the river. 

Lene in the destroyer's Captain's chair and by the catapult on the carrier's flight deck; Roger in a sort of Dukakis moment.

 

They have a Congressional Medal of Honor hall of fame on part of the carrier’s hanger deck, where I looked up Owen Hammerberg, who, having saved one shipmate, died while trying to save another. The destroyer escort on which I served, was named after him.

We visited the Old Exchange Building

Used as a dungeon for pirates by the colonials and for supporters of our Revolution by the British, our Docent was obviously enjoying his explanation of it.

 

The ballroom upstairs is where President Washington was feted, the secession was signed, and public functions and weddings are held these days. The first crop that made South Carolina rich, with nine of the ten richest people in the colonies living in this state, was not cotton but "Carolina Gold" namely rice, traded here. Facade of a rice warehouse, by the docks; the rest blown away by a hurricane.

St. Michael’s steeple was painted black in war time. It towers over this essentially low rise city and many famous residents of this state are buried here.

 The Gibbes Museum of Art

has a mediocre permanent collection trying to show the history of the City through art, heavy in portraits. It also had a beautiful temporary show of large watercolors of southern working people doing jobs that are going away: shrimper, mill worker, tobacco farmer, drive in movie operator, elevator operator, shoe shiner, etc.

I visited the historic Edmondston-Alston House, right next to the seawall that protects the city from the sea, with steps down to the street and an artist seated on the wall painting the house:

It is one of many old luxury homes lining the Battery.

  

Magnolias in bloom from the Edmonston-Alston house's porch:

 

I walked around the oldest part of town, near the battery, where very old homes, registered as historic, are being lived in and sold at very expensive prices, with plaques showing their history.

The battery’s promenade is not a boardwalk, to let waves pass under, but a seawall, to keep the sea out of the city.

From the Battery: views of the Cooper,

 and the Ashley, with Battery Park at right,

and the park's monument to confederate soldiers.

Posted from River Dunes Marina, Oriental, N. Car.

Beautiful Beaufort, Soth Carolina

The “Beau” in Beaufort SC sounds like those same letters in “beautiful; this contrasts with the sound of those same letters in Beaufort NC, which is pronounced like “bow” in bow and arrow. But if you mispronounce their city, the residents, very friendly, will patiently just correct you. Beaufort, population 12,000, in the 2010 census, according to the reference librarian at the county library,

is the county seat of Beaufort County, population 162,000, most of them being on Hilton Head, which is in the same county and has vastly surpassed the historic town.

We spent and enjoyed two nights and one full day here, at the Downtown Marina (ILENE toward the left).

It is a small marina, friendly and efficient, operated by the municipality. Its only problem is a strong current running up and down the Beaufort River. They put us on the outside dock but close to boats in front and behind us. Ilene brought us to the dock skillfully, letting the wind blow us on, and we used a springline to get our bow away from the dock and from the stern of the boat in front of us, in departing. The marina provided free wifi, that works, but I went to a nearby coffee shop to get a super strong signal for uploading the photos for the Savannah posting.

They call it the Downtown Marina because it is one short block, through a lovely municipal park from the main drag:  Lene, here on one of about 20 municipal swinging benches facing the sea and the men's afternoon lawn bowling league (or is it Bocci?) with the chains of one of those swings in the background:

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Bay Street is the main street in town, with lots of restaurants, art galleries and other shops.We had good food in Plums for lunch and Saltus for a more "fine dining" dinner, a rare two meals off the boat for us in one day. We enjoyed the local shrimp, mussels, scallops, clams and oysters in addition to swordfish.

 We took a guided tour of town with Buck, and his mistress:

 Buck knows the way, which is why the driver spent so much time facing back and narrating.

We saw lovely old homes

How do you like these Spanish moss laden live oak trees?

This is a large bowl made of a hollow limb of a dead live oak, open at both ends. I was very tempted to purchase it ($200) because of its natural beauty; but where would we keep it.

The bricks in this wall were used as ballast in British ships and then repurposed once the ships were on this side of the puddle.

We passed the first Black Church in town, with a bust of Robert Smalls, a native son who escaped slavery during the civil war by commandeering the confederate ship on which he had been working and was later elected to Congress, and we saw the local Synagogue

Altogether a very pretty little town. Lene said: “I could live here.” But I don’t think so.

Two Days on the S. Car. Inter Coastal Waterway

Having sailed out in the ocean from Fort Lauderdale to St. Augustine and from there to Savannah, our next two hops, from Savannah to Beaufort SC and from there to Charleston SC were in the Inter Coastal Waterway ICW) called "the ditch". Our distances were 43 and 59 nautical miles on the two days.  Here, waves are not a big concern and winds are normally light but the path is twisty, so this is mostly a motor propelled journey. however, we did set the little jib for a bit more propulsion and even sailed the last ten miles to Beaufort SC on a favorable current up the Beaufort River. Sailing in the ocean, auto pilot steers us to our destination for hours, with occasional checking and minor adjustments of one degree to port or to starboard if ILENE drifts off a bit. Here, however, there are buoys or day markers (buoy signs on stakes) every few hundred yards requiring the helmsperson to pay attention to the charts, the GPS and what his or her eyes are saying, to keep on a course with numerous bends of up to 90 degrees.

There are a variety of conditions as to depth and width in the ICW. While average depth in this stretch was an estimated 15 feet, we experienced 30 feet or more in some places, and the scary sound of our depth alarm screaming at us that we had less than seven feet (16 inches under our keel) in some stretches and once less than six feet. Some of the Sounds we traversed were a mile wide with sufficient depth through most of their width. Others are just as wide but have a deep enough channel cut through them that is quite narrow. Here we are following another boat and it looks like there’s nothing but room. But if you notice the red triangle on the post, you can see that we have to pick our way from pillar to post to stay in the deep channel.

A shrimp boat overtaking us:

Our vigilant lookouts enjoying a calm passage:

We passed big homes with long piers leading out to their pavilions and floating docks.

 

We meant to take a photo while passing Hilton Head of the beautiful circular marina with the red and white lighthouse that my brother likes to visit, by land, but while passing we were overtaken by a strong rainstorm that obliterated visibility. But we did photograph a less picturesque Hilton Head Marina.

Daily distance to be made is relatively easy to compute because the charts have magenta lines, perpendicular to the twisting track of the ICW, at intervals of every five statutory miles. So with Beaufort at statutory mile 536 (one away from 535 by extrapolation) and Charleston at 467, the difference is 69 statutory miles. But our speed is in knots, meaning nautical miles per hour, and a statutory (land) mile of 5280 feet is .88 of a nautical mile of 6000 feet. I round this 88 percent to 90 percent so I just subtract ten percent, reducing the 69 statutory miles, by let’s say 7, to 62 nautical miles. This means that with let’s say 14 hours of daylight, if we leave at 6:30 am, we will get to our destination by 8:30 pm nightfall even if we only maintain an average speed of only 4.5 knots. The first day was easy and, as mentioned, we actually sailed a bit and got in at about 4 pm. The second day was longer.

Speed is very dependent on tides, bridges, depth and unexpected circumstances.  In shallow water we go slow. As to tides, the ICW in South Carolina uses rivers and sounds that run from the land to the sea, with canals cut through between them from one to another in strategic places to shorten the course.  If you get a favorable tide ebbing out to sea on one river that you are following toward the sea, that tidal flow will be continuing in the same direction for six hours in the next river, where you may be motoring upstream against the tide and current. And only persons with excellent knowledge of the local waters will know which way the tide will be flowing in the man-made canals between the rivers. We sought to motor at six knots, and actually made as much as 7.8 knots over the ground with the tide and as little as 4.2 when against it.

Most bridges we encountered were the modern ones, with the bottom of the span in the center being 65 feet above the water level at the normal high tide, sufficient for us to pass under at any time because the top of our mast is only 63.5 feet above the waterline. Such high bridges are expensive to build, but low expense because bridge tenders need not be hired. They have signs with numbers posted at the footings of the bridges which show the exact number of feet from the level of the water showing against the sign at the time of your passage, let’s say 68 feet at low tide and as little as 62 feet at extreme highs caused by full or new moons and flooding.

But there are also lower bridges that have to be opened by their tenders.  Some open on demand and others, only at fixed times. We had a problem with one of these, located only a few miles before Charleston, caused when our engine stopped for a few minutes.  We burned a lot more fuel per hour than I had realized while going full tilt, as we had coming to Savannah, than at idle speed with no load as when chilling the refrigerator. Our aft fuel tank had run dry.  It took me a few minutes before we could get it started again using the other, forward fuel tank, which was full.  On the day of that stoppage we had followed a boat called “Autumn Borne”, with a hailing port of Buffalo, NY, through the bridge at Beaufort, SC, at its 7:30 am opening.  I had asked Lene to call them to strike up a short conversation about where that they were going. They said that they were headed for Charleston, as we were that day, had done this trip many times, and offered to let us follow them, which we gratefully accepted.  In fact, the first photo in this posting shows them ahead of us. We had the small head sail up, more for stability than speed, when the engine stopped. We still had one knot of propulsion and we called them to tell them that we would be dropping back and would catch up with them at Charleston. But they, as I would have done, returned to provide help if needed, though they did not even know our names yet. It is a beautiful thing that sailors look out for each other. 

A few minutes after our engine came back to life, they told us that the low bridge near Charleston had no openings from 4 pm to 6:30 pm - rush hour for the land people.  I confirmed this, and doing the math, later reported that if we could maintain six knots, for the remaining three hours until 4 pm, we would be OK.  Autumn Borne concurred. We were actually going faster than six knots until we came to the cut over which the problem bridge crossed. Then we hit the strongest adverse tide of all. Even running the engine at full speed, we were slowed to 4.2 knots for about a mile. When the bridge came into view, we saw that it was already open to permit a big dredging rig to pass. We hurried and made it under that bridge with 13 minutes to spare. Whew!

We will soon report on Beaufort and on Charleston, but the next leg on the ICW has a notoriously shallow stretch and so we hope for weather that will permit us to sail in the ocean.

Posted from Charleston, SC.

Savannah

Savannah’s old city is located on a bluff on the south side of the river. The bluff protects it from flooding. It is a beautiful city, at least its historic downtown, the part we saw. It was laid out in a grid with small parks cutting into the corners of other blocks, every three or four blocks. Each park, or square, is named after a historical figure, including Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, allowed by the Crown as a buffer to Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe’s views forbade slavery, but once he passed from power and the cotton gin made the growing of cotton so profitable, the white landed citizens demanded slavery, which was introduced.

Monuments stud the city: to Irish immigrants, Vietnam war dead, Jewish doctors aboard a ship which arrived in time to save the city from an epidemic, native son songwriter Johnny Mercer, etc. Oglethorpe shares his square with an Indian chief who helped the struggling colony from the beginning.  Juliette Low, founder of the Girl Scouts, was born and raised here and her home is one of about a dozen that are open for viewing.  Paula Deen, a star of the Cooking Network, has her own living monument “ Lady & Sons” restaurant, as well as tours of it, and her cookbooks and memorabilia are sold everywhere.

We walked two miles to Economy Feed and Seed store with our virtually empty propane tank and took a cab back when it was full. Cab fare exceeded the price of the propane!  Here, unlike St. Augustine, we did take the Old Town Trolley tourist experience, which is a bus not a trolley, and lets you off at any of 15 spots, and back on again on the next trolley, which run every 15 minutes. 

Live oak trees with Spanish moss seem to epitomize this place.

We did not stop at each of the 15 places and there is a lot more to see than we could handle in three days.

The Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum is focused on ship models, many of them named "Savannah", the history of the former Savannah Overseas Shipping Co. (with the unfortunate initials “SOS”), ships in bottles and a bit on Savannah’s naval participation in our Civil War.

The Owens-Thomas house is a beautiful example of Georgian architecture and with indoor plumbing no less. It was owned by a prosperous merchant who went bankrupt, run for many years by the bank that took it over as a boarding house, and acquired by the Mayor, who was later a long time member of the House of Representatives in the age of Jacksonian Democracy, and whose last surviving heir gave the house to the city with enough money to endow its maintenance. The house's main claim to fame is that on the 50^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Lafayette gave a series of lectures around the nation, cheering on the still-fledgling democracy, and delivered his speech in English, and to a Haitian contingent in French, from the balcony of this house in which he and his entourage were put up and feted.

How do you like this scallop shaped ceiling molding, in both the Owens Thomas and the Telfair houses:

At another historic house, toward closing time, I heard a lecture by a docent in period costume to a group of Girl Scouts and their mothers on tea, which was then followed by a tea that I’m sure the girls enjoyed.

We stopped at the City Market area, filled with restaurants and galleries. I visited the Telfair House, another of the old homes now a museum affiliated with South Carolina School of Design, beautifully restored with a collection of 90 percent American artists, with 90 percent of the work created during the period 1890 to 1910, of which I recognized only one name: Childe Hassam. The curator at that time also collected full size plaster casts of sculptures of the renaissance and ancient Greeks from European museums, for the school's students to sketch.  We also paid a visit to the Savannah History Museum.

But we are probably the only tourists in the history of the Old Town Trolley to stop at Savannah’s largest park to purchase and schlep back bags of groceries from the nearby Krogers supermarket. We did not take the horse drawn carriage ride here.

Our dock, the town dock, its manager specifically told us, "is not a marina.” It had no services whatsoever: No staff to help us with our dock lines when Lene steered us right to the dock, no showers and no toilette-- just a dock. We had to find the office, inside a large municipal parking garage, to pay our wharfage bill.  What they are selling for $1.50 per foot is a parking space. 

But there is an extra benefit: we were right alongside River street where hordes of tourists pass every day, especially on the weekends. We were right next to the River Queen stern wheeler replica, which takes tourists out on river cruises. Note Alphie on the floating dock. At high tide, shown here, she also jumped from the floating dock to the tourist plaza.

It is exciting to be so close to so many people, and Whitty and Alphie’s images are on many people’s cameras. It is nice to hear your boat being praised and I love to talk to people about my boat and our journey. But the downside is that the tourists and the music from facing restaurants and buskers on the street is loud and on weekends lasts till late at night. There was a big shrimp boat at the other end of the dock.

 Our last day was devoted to a visit by Marc and Pam.

They had been members of our congregation and I brought Marc to the Harlem years ago when he purchased his first boat from the Club, which had acquired it through a lien. Mark is a joiner, an active committed member and a leader in all of his organizations, having served as treasurer of the Harlem and sung in the choir and now in a barbershop quartet group. He also invited me to join him and two other men he knew for a week’s bareboat charter in the BVIs, my first taste of Caribbean cruising. Who could have foreseen what that week would lead to?  Marc and Pam moved to Augusta from the New York area to be near her mom more than a decade ago. He now sails a 30 foot sloop on a nearby 22 mile long reservoir. The day had been planned with possible touring in mind but we all had fun just schmoozing and eating, including dinner at Huey’s.
These two cats from Kilkenny, fight, but love each other.

 

Posted from Beaufort, SC.

A Rough Passage - St. Augustine to Savannah, May 9-10

The automated voice of the NOAA weatherman had predicted rain at night, chance of thunderstorms (but they predict that every day) and wind from the north, in our face, the second day, but at only five to ten knots.  Light winds were also predicted by our other sources.  We left St. Augustine at the 10 am bridge opening and planned, based on distance divided by speed, to arrive at the red and white buoy marking the entrance to the well-buoyed channel leading to the Savannah River at about 6 to 9 am the next morning. This would give us the incoming tide to help push us the remaining 19 miles through the river’s delta and up to Savannah. We figured that beating into five to ten knots for just a few hours would not be very hard on us or the boat.  Or the cats!

During the first day, the wind was at our side but stronger than expected. With main and genoa we were doing 7.5 knots and ahead of schedule. We saw several merchant vessels at a distance, several pleasure fishing boats, and one sailboat, going the other way. And then we saw a large navy ship, perhaps a Destroyer Leader (DLG), crossing our bow from starboard to port, several miles away, apparently headed for Jacksonville. Later we saw it again on a course parallel to ours, overtaking us on our starboard side. This time two smaller but fast vessels, side by side, came toward us from our port side. The Communications Officer, Lene, went below to listen to the radio and we discovered that they were engaged in a naval exercise – and we were right in the middle of it! But they neither asked us to get out of the way nor shot at us, so all was OK. Eventually both turned away from us in different directions.

In late afternoon we saw and heard the thunder of a big cloud approaching us from the west and reefed the main, replaced the big genoa with the small jib and donned foul weather gear. It was not a particularly ugly black cloud but it caught us with heavier wind and heavy rain. I sent Lene below to keep dry. Dodging to starboard did not work so eventually we went to port to get through it quickly, and half an hour later it was past us.

Lene made up a big pot of rice with chopped up burgers; a very filling dinner at sea.

But then another cloud appeared behind us and this one was bigger, black, and ugly.

It was getting toward dark and we turned on the radar which showed, for its entire maximum 24 mile range, a wall of storms (yellow on the radar) approaching us from the west – a squall line, with the storm several miles thick. No way to dodge this one. 

High winds, heavy rain and stinging sleet were upon us and stayed with us for about an hour and then it was cold. A cold front had passed over us. And then the wind was from the north, as predicted, except about six hours too early and at 20 to 25 knots, not the 5 to 10 predicted. We used the engine and the reefed main during the night, but were only making about five to 5.5 knots and that speed was not directed toward our destination, but beating back and forth across the dotted line to our waypoint. And the computer was telling us that we would not arrive there until as late as 2 pm the next day and NOAA now predicted no abatement of the wind. Our other weather sources were not available because we were out of wifi range. Lene, all dressed up in warm clothes, life preserver, harness and tether clipped to cockpit jackline (the blue line under the surveilling Alphie, next day), started her watch. 

She decided that she could not do this alone and asked me to come up to the cockpit, so I donned such clothing and lay in the cockpit with her. We had closed the front clear plastic panel of the dodger to create some degree of protection from the wind in the forward part of the cockpit. The boat was crashing through big waves, rising up over them and then crashing down into them. The boat makes a lot of noise in such conditions. She creaks and groans constantly and when below particularly, sounds as if she is being hit with sledgehammers every 10 seconds or so.. Lene was afraid that it would break up at sea, with us 25 miles off the coast. But like a strong oak tree in a storm, which bends, but does not break, our boat stood up to the beating it took.

After a few hours Lene went below to lie down though she could not get to sleep, and I stood the watch alone. Like that song from Annie: The Sun Does Come Out Tomorrow and did so that following morning. Actually the eastern sky gets a glimmer of light well before the official time of sunrise. When it got light enough, I put out the small jib to help with the reefed main and engine to get us more speed, up to  6 – 6.5, but still at angles rather than directly toward our destination. Our first morning without coffee; peanut butter sandwiches was all Lene could manage.

Then about 10:30 am, I checked the paper charts again to plan for the portion of the voyage from the red and white buoy to and up the river to see if we could keep our sails up in the channel.  I zoomed in the chart plotter to the waypoint I had set in to compare the route from there up the river with the paper chart, but it didn't look like what I had expected. What the heck is going on here??? Do you remember that card in the Monopoly game: “The bank has made an error in your favor.” Well I had made an error in plugging in the waypoint the morning before, the waypoint that we had been heading for all day and night. Savannah’s entrance was almost ten miles (two hours) nearer than expected.  I couldn't wait to tell Lene about this error now in our favor.  I KNEW how happy this was going to make her feel! We tacked to starboard tack and headed almost directly for the new and corrected waypoint. In fact we were able to gain the tail end of the favorable tide for about two thirds of the 19 miles up the Savannah River and the early adverse tide is not very strong.  Finally things were really in our favor.

The river has been dredged to a depth of over 40 feet way past the city and the city’s port is reputed to be the second busiest on the east coast. We had seen a pilot boat heading out of the river toward a big freighter that was many miles behind us, and then pass us again, coming back in again after having deposited its pilot on the merchantman. And we saw the big merchantman getting closer to us.
The communications officer went below to call MSC on VHF channel 13 to try to accommodate the big guy. He said that he was OK for now, but he would be passing another giant going out round the next bend and would we please hug the right shore, which we did.

We arrived and tied up to the municipal dock which is parallel to River Street, had lunch at Huey’s, a New Orleans style restaurant, paid for four nights wharfage, cleaned up the boat, which had gotten messed up in the storm, and I fell asleep for a long quiet night.

We later received an e-mail from Bob and Laura aboard “Thai Hot.” They are also returning to the Harlem YC; we had last seen them in St. Martin. They got caught in the same storm for a longer period of time on a longer passage, from northern Florida to North Carolina. Thai Hot is a sturdier but slower boat than ILENE. They too, made it through the storm.

Posted from Beaufort SC.