Month: March 2015

Explored more of Beaufort this morning after a glorious breakfast at Blackstone’s. Beaufort’s architecture is more West Indies than plantation. Spring is definitely springing here — azaleas just starting to blossom, mollie azaleas full of fragrance, camellias in white and pink plus the flowering trees, many of which are laden with Spanish moss. Trip to Hilton Head was an adventure, crossing wide expanses of water on the look-out for the marks that would lead us in our southerly direction. Weather warmed up quite a bit — hooray — enough that shorts were not totally crazy, though having a jacket nearby made sense.  Hilton Head’s Sea Pines Resort is quite posh!  We arrived to sunshine and enough wind to make mooring a challenge, but Cliff did a fabulous job with nary a pause from turning into the slip to having lines and power cord secured.

Underway, at last! Heading from Charleston to Beaufort. This trip has been a dream 20 years in the making. I can still remember getting an ICW cruising guide as a Christmas present when we were still living at 1949 Lincoln and reading it from cover to cover within a week. Doing it now is even better. No telephone calls to make back to the office, clients to worry about or other pre-retirement duties are calling. Ahhhh. That’s the sound of happy. The course of the Intracoastal from Charleston starts at Wapoo Creek and winds through a number of river channels — it is very calm and usually bordered by marsh areas that look prairie-like at low tide and more like seaweed at high tide. You get a very good idea of why this area is called the Low Country.  Special note about Beaufort….in South Carolina it is pronounced Bew-fort (as in Beautiful).  In North Carolina they go for the French version:  Bow-fort.

Awoke to a rainy and grey day with a Coast Guard warning about coastal flooding. Apparently, flooding is a fairly common occurrence in Charleston. Yesterday’s tour guide remarked that his family routinely carries furniture from the first floor to the second and then hopes for the best for the appliances too large to move. A nice thing about being on a boat is that “coastal flooding” just means that the water gets deeper!  Will’s comment about the weather was perfect:  “Even a grey day on Dot.Calm is bright.”  Today we cruised back to Gdansk, er, I mean the original boat yard, to pick up repaired stanchion and the dinghy that the truck driver, thankfully, dropped off. The grey sky matched the grey of military refueling ships that seem to be in dry dock and the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier, an on-the-water museum/attraction. Our route took us under the stunning Arthur Ravenal Bridge that spans the Cooper River — pronounced, we learned on our tour, to rhyme with “cooker” and not “coo-per.”  We celebrated our first mini-cruise with granola-banana-blueberry-yogurt parfaits and a glass of champagne. Yum. Afternoon spent zipping to variety of stores to get a long list of things we’ve decided we cannot do without before we set off tomorrow for the first leg of our ICW trip from Charleston to Beaufort.

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A walking tour with a 7th generation Charlestonian today. (His wife, he said, dates her family history in the city back for 11 generations!) He is a retired math and science teacher with definite opinions and wide-ranging knowledge. I can say for sure that his comments about the North’s “War of Aggression” had a different slant from the Civil War history I’ve read. Several of the Yankee guests pointed out (under their breath) that the South had fired the first shot at Fort Sumpter, but I do not think their version would have changed his mind. He was enthusiastic (and all of the Dot.Calm crew were aghast) about the city’s restrictive zoning policies. Exterior paint colors require hard-to-get approvals and it is completely verboten to take down interior walls or even break through them even to add air conditioning. So while Charleston residents may not be cool, they do have a lovely city to show for it. We learned that SOB has an entirely different and snooty meaning here — South of Broad, where the truly rich live in fabulous 17th and 18th century homes. Later we saw a restaurant, north of Broad, that capitalized (literally) on this local geographic distinction: South (Nearly) of Broad, otherwise known as S.N.O.B. We lunched at chef Sean Brock’s Husk, his original restaurant renowned for its local, Southern ingredient focus. I had some sort of rebel whisky concoction that went down way too easily!  If you haven’t tried pigs ears, I’d say go for it if you get the chance!

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Who knew there was a huge Irish contingent in Charleston? The Hibernia Society is one of the three “blue blood” organizations in town and St. Patrick’s Day puts them over the top. Even a tiny island out in the harbor (near Fort Sumpter) was decked with an Irish flag for the occasion. The warning from the locals was “stay out of town” and so we did. Roger and Will arrived early evening and we enjoyed a cocktail on the top deck, enjoying the sunset over the city and the beauty of the boats and water all around us. Amazingly, they were able to stow three suitcases worth of “stuff” in the guest quarters. Roomier than I thought. Though the suitcases had to be stashed in the bathtub!

Charleston City Marina will be our home for the next four days. We are poised on the far edge of the marina on the Mega Dock. We are definitely the exception. Spent the day scurrying to get lots of work done on board, solving the usual assortment of glitches attendant to getting a boat ready for a cruise. Roger and Will arrive tomorrow so we have an incentive for getting everything done! Charleston is filled with restaurants and, not surprisingly, a number of them are named for the low country cuisine the area is famous for. We had breakfast at the Hominy Grill, passed up lunch at the Okra Cafe and dined at Stars (okay, not a food, but a good description of the night sky here). Couldn’t pass up an ice cream at Jeni’s (there was a line out the door at 8pm!) and you shouldn’t either if you get this way.

Headed from the dirty snow dregs of winter in Chicago to springtime in Charleston. We were treated to a speeded up version of spring’s arrival as we drove south — first with barely visible buds blurring stark tree limbs with a mere hint of color and a hundred or so miles later, Bradford pears showing off their bosomy shapes in drifts of white flowers along with service berry trees laden with blooms. Shy dogwoods awaited more sunshine, but the sunny sides of streets showed magenta and pink flowers dancing along the branches of red bud trees.  We passed up the delights of Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail and the Rebecca Ruth Candy Tour to get to Lexington for our first night and then directly on to Charleston. Even the lure of a stop at Summerville, SC (the birthplace of sweet tea!) or Folly Beach did not deter us. Now, we just have to figure out how to stow all this stuff on the boat!

Do you think it will all fit?!

Moving a boat via roadways is something we’ve done before.  Our sailboat, Ready or Knot, moved from Beaufort, SC to Chicago.  Taken apart and put together again with nary a glitch (or at least any that are memorable.)  Our experience with the Knoxville to Charleston journey is not quite so good.

 I described the new spot as Gdansk. And that was being charitable.

Every scoop from the crane into the barge set off 2 foot waves at the dock.

The less-than-desirable location wasn’t the problem.  The problem was that things that were working perfectly in Knoxville weren’t working at all in Charleston.  The switch that allows you to drive from either the top deck or inside….not working.  The davit for the dinghy was bent and the dinghy no where to be found. (Driver dropped it off and will return it this week….we hope.)  DirectTV system not working and satellite search system won’t turn off.  Ugh and ugh.

Cliff’s cheery email:  “This has not been a perfect adventure, but with any luck will turn out to have only a few shortcomings that we will be able to recover from.”  Sure hope so!

Getting a 52 foot boat to a new harbor via roads isn’t that easy.  Dot.Calm had to be taken apart from the top radar and TV antennas down to the top deck windshield.  Cliff traveled to Knoxville to watch the entire process, then drove to Charleston to see that it was properly put together again, i.e., everything working and in good order.  More about that later!

Here you see the top tier being removed with a crane.

Loaded onto a flatbed awaiting removal of hardtop and windshield.

Saloon area is stuffed for shipment south.

The “navigation pros” in Knoxville have talked us out of a Knoxville to Mobile river journey.  Lots of debris in the water (which translates to “you will wreck your prop”), uncertain waits at locks since everyone else goes before pleasure craft like ours, and long stretches of travel with no marinas, no restaurants and no help if you need it.  So, on to Plan B:  We are trucking boat to Charleston and will depart from there.  Are you surprised that there were a lot more people who wanted to take the journey from Charleston than from Knoxville?

 Here she is with the her new name.

This is the back view…Marathon will be her home port.