Friday, April 27, 2007

I am now done with Charleston and want to move on. Staying at one marina for 5 days has made me antsy. I need to get moving. No pictures tonight because free wi-fi is worth about what you pay for it. It is so slow that loading a picture takes upwards of 1/2 hour - too frustrating to do. The bad weather never showed - it went north of us- so I feel as though a lot of time has been wasted just sitting here. I'm hoping to start northward early (9am) tomorrow. We will be bucking the tide for the first 3 hours but once we're north of Charleston we enter a small, narrow channel for about 10-15 miles, then 20 miles in the Waccamaw River, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful and pristine areas of the ICW. Then we cross the South and North Santee Rivers, then into the Estherville Minum Canal, then into Winyah Bay - off which Georgetown, SC lies. A total of 67 miles. I'm outta here!


Linda here- Well, I am having a good time- I like Charleston! The wind has been relentless, but the skies are blue and people are friendly. Today we went to West Marine & bought another life vest- so we are totally legal if we get boarded by the Coast Guard. (We had 2 inflatable vests which only count if you wear them all the time.) We went back to downtown & took a horse-drawn carriage tour of the city. Cory came with us! It was informative and pretty neat. Tomorrow we leave for Georgetown, SC- which is also supposed to be a fun stop. I have been in email contact with my cousin Judy (et al) who lives in Southern NC. We are looking forward to seeing familiar faces!!! I certainly hope we get to post more photos soon- I know that I really like to see photos on the blog, so you must, too! Love to all- Linda

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Still in Charleston, SC.....

Typical stret scene in Charleston-but this photo does not show the beautiful gardens & courtyards.

We really enjoyedthis French restaurant in the French Quarter of Charleston! Soup & salad & Orangina!



Ken was waiting for some important mail, so we had to stay here thru Friday! I'm not bothered at all, but Ken really wants to moveon. So today we went back to downtown Charleston to the grocery store, other shops, and a long walk. Then we went to a boat show(!) at Ripley Light Yacht Club. Looking for the NEXT boat! It was hot & humid today, rain & wind for tomorrow, so we'll stay until Sat. am. Sorry there are only 2 photos- but the internet wifi connection keeps bombing us out. At least we got these to you! We'll try again tomorrow- Linda & Ken

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Tuesday, April 24- We have been in Charleston, SC for 24 hours now, and I still love it. It’s like a city for non-city people. Lots of shopping in cute little shops, horse-drawn carriages with big draft horses, arts & crafts, no sky-scrapers allowed- the church steeples are the tallest buildings in the city. College of Charleston has a great campus. The people are VERY friendly- everyone says “Hey”. (Translated into CT-talk- “hello”.) We stopped into a few galleries and pricey stores, too. But I just bought a T-shirt and we got lunch at Bubba Gump’s Shrimp House. The old mansions look gorgeous & stately- after we get our repairs done tomorrow we will go exploring further. It’s difficult to decide- plantation? Aquarium? Museum? Church tour? House tour? So much to do! Linda

Here we are again - still in Charleston. It's about 9:00pm on Wednesday night. I learned at about 5:00pm that we are going to have to stay here for at least 2 more days. The reason - I haven't received the important mail that I have been waiting for. Hopefully it will come on Thursday, but that doesn't help much, because a storm front is approaching and is supposed to arrive on Thursday night and Friday. It'snot much of a storm but the winds are supposed to 20-25 knots. We don't feel comfortable moving in those winds. Also, the next 70 miles to Georgetown are reportedly very shallow. That brings the tide into play. We need to leave on a low or a rising tide, which means boating later in the day, which means more wind - kind of a Catch22. On the good side - Volvo service arrived today and the oil, oil filter, and fuel filter have all been changed. We're good, servicewise, for the next 500-600 miles. Linda is currently watching "American Idol" which I cannot stand. She spent a couple of hours today labeling a portion of our pictures. We have taken more than 900 pictures so far - anyone for an 8 hr. slide show? Today we went sightseeing to an antebellum "city plantation house." The more we see of this city, the more we like it. Still, even the natives talk about the summer weather being oppressively hot and buggy. I hope to head northward on Saturday, or possibly Sunday, and travel for 2-3 days northward. PS - more pictures tomorrow.Ken


Day 21 -
They continue to hold me captive!
We are in Charleston, somewhere in the south.
I am OK! The food has not changed for weeks. I will try to escape soon! CORY!!!

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Hello Charleston, SC

Monday morning and we leave Beaufort, SC and head north towards Charleston, SC. The rivers are lined by houses very similar to this one. And, just like Florida, most of them are for sale!
This picture is pretty typical of our ride northward to Charleston. The rivers are wide but the channel is narrow. The channel, usually marked with "ranges," is about 15 ft. deep. Outside the channel and the depth is lower than 5 feet. How low - we don't know - so far we've been able to keep in the middle of the channel.

Just because the river is wide doesn't mean that it is deep. The docks are long to try and get out into navigable water. Each dock is labeled "No wake" but there are thousands of these - we motor right by the ones that don't have boats in the water. We have to slow for others. If you look carefully, you can see it would be a LONG walk from your house to the end of the dock!


Which boat is ours??? This is our slip at Charleston Marina. We arrived in a 25 mph wind off the starboard side. The landing wound have been difficult without the cruise ship there. We got behind the cruise ship and voila, no wind. The ship is headed to Jacksonville, FL and left at 1030 at night.


We walked around the marina area of Charleston and I really liked these row houses.


This is Linda's favorite house in Charleston -so far! The gardens are beautiful, and some of the houses use gas lanterns to light their doorways.





These are the cheap slips in this marina. Note the sailboats in the corner! Very wide tidal ranges still. What a sunset!



Hi - we are now in Charleston, SC after a beautiful ride of about 70 miles through the wide and mostly deep streams and creeks of South Carolina. The weather is beautiful and the boat is working well. We are currently docked at the Charleston City Marina - the biggest marina that we've stayed at yet and one of the nicest and cleanest. There are 400 boats in the marina with 100 spaces for transients. Each dock has gas and pumpout so you don't have to move the boat to the gas dock. There is complimentary wi-fi that works and the restrooms are modern and clean - what else do we need? I made arrangements for a Volvo mechanic to come to the boat and change the oil and fuel filters - we are almost exactly at 50 hrs. so it is right on schedule. They're supposed to come either today or tomorrow. I also am having some important mail forwarded here - we may have to stay an extra day til that arrives. We are planning to stay until Wednesday but will probably be here until Thursday, or maybe longer if the weather doesn't cooperate. We plan on exploring this city a little bit. This marina has a courtesy shuttle into the city and back, which is great.
I figured I would give some statistics of our trip so far:
We are at mile marker 570 - which means it's 570 miles to Norfolk, VA
We have traveled 418 miles up the ICW on the east coast and additional 175 miles getting to the east coast - for a total of 593 miles so far.
We have used 426.88 gals on gas since we put the boat in the water for 1.4 mpg!!!
Gas costs have ranged from $2.79 - 3.47 per gallon
We have 67 hours on the boat - so we're averaging 8.8 mph.
The first 17 hours were breakin time so the actual time on the ICW is 50 hrs. for an average ICW speed of 11.9 mph.
We normally travel between 50-85 miles a day and a total of 4-6 hrs a day.
Interior living dimensions:
Main room - 10 ft. long X 5 ft. wide X 6 ft. high (also includes kitchen and v-berth)
2nd bedroom - 6'5" long X 5 ft. wide X 2 ft. high
Bathroom - 3 ft. wide X 2 1/2 ft. deep X 6 ft. high
That equals about 88 sq. ft. of which 31 sq. ft. is only 2 ft. high!!!
Just a small note about Kilkenny Marina, GA - I just was reviewing the paperwork and noticed that they billed me for 49 g of gas when I only got 39 gal! I would normally think it was a mistake except they were so unfriendly that I have to recommend to anyone reading this that might go on the ICW - don't stay at Kilkenny Marina, or certainly pay more attention then I did.
That's all from Ken for now.

Hello from Linda- So far, I LOVE SC! The ICW is gorgeous and the people are friendly. As you can read by Ken's writing above- the living space on the boat is small and getting smaller by the day! But to me that just means we need to get out more & explore. Last pm we walked thru part of the city- mostly OLD residences with 2 story porches and beautiful architecture. Today we are taking the courtesy shuttle to SHOPPING!!! (can you tell I'm excited!?) We had to pay the marina for a 30' boat even though we are only 26' long. We are surrounded by HUGE boats. The marina next door wouldn't even let us in (we ARE riff-raff!) even if we paid for the 30' space! The bath house is nearby with showers, laundry, and heads- it's FLOATING just like the dock we're tied to. Off to walk the dog (poor thing is getting to be afraid of grass- cuz that's where all the burrs are!) Love to all-

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Into South Carolina!

Between Kilkenny Creek, GA & Beaufort, SC we were greeted by several dolphins. These two followed our boat for a while- we even saw their cute little smiling faces! (It's hard to take a photo of something moving from a moving boat!)
Brunswick, GA is famous for "The Marshes of Glynn". This view goes on in all directions for 75 miles (!!) as we wind our way among them.

We thought you might want to see MORE Marshes of Glynn, since we`had to see them all morning!


Kilkenny Creek Marina in all its glory.That's it. It's just the one wooden, shaky, splintered, bad electricity-supplied dock.



This photo of Kilkenny's lovely ladies' room does not include the lightbulb with a string hanging from the ceiling. But it DOES have the questionable pass-thru door - into the marina store! ?!



Beautiful live oak tree, little Cory, and handsome Captain Ken at Kilkenny Creek Marina. I wanted to get a "Kilkenny" hat but they only had the ugly Elmer Fudd kind.


We arrive at Port Royal Marina, just south of Beaufort, SC. Our boat is not visible here but is tucked into the upper right corner of the picture. A beautiful day!


Linda here- just some thoughts on Georgia, now that we're safely in SC! If you're ever in Brunswick, get some Brunswick stew- a delicious tomato-based stew with veggies and pork and corn and spices. YUM! Also- we saw a bald eagle & dolphins & wood storks today. The amount of palm trees is lessening and the nights are colder now that we're more North! It's usually in the 50's by am. But the past few days have been gorgeous weather, so we plan to go to Charleston,SC tomorrow, and stay for a few days. Love- Linda
Today we traveled about 80 miles and entered into South Carolina. The route was easier today than yesterday. We only had to cross one sound - by the way, a sound is where a large river makes its way to the Atlantic Ocean. If you hit them with the right tide and wind, they're not bad. Wrong tide and wrong wind and they get stirred up to high, steep, close, waves. We have been fortunate so far with no bad crossings - nothing we haven't seen on a regular basis on Long Island Sound. Which is good because this boat is light and doesn't like the chop. I now have 58 hrs. on the engine - a normal seasons worth of hours. I'm looking for a mechanic so I can get the oil changed. Our next stop, which will be for at least 2 nights, is at Charleston, SC - that's where I'm going to try and schedule maintenance. The waterways so far in SC have been wider and deeper but we have only been traveling 3 hrs on each side of high tide - it just worked out that way in this last stretch. We are currently at ICW mile #540. That means we have 600 miles behind us - not too shabby. See you all soon. Ken




Kilkenney Creek

Saturday - (we're writing this on Sunday pretending it's Sat. night) - we arrive at Kilkenny Marina after a long day of winding creeks, crossing sounds, and generally having a difficult time navigation wise. I'm going to list the route we took - Exit from the East River, cross St. Simons Sound, onto Back River, to Mackay River, to Buttermilk Sound, cross Altamaha Sound, enter Little Mud River, go to North River, cross Doboy Sound, to Old Tea Kettle Creek, through the Creighton Narrows, onto Front River, across Sapelo Sound, onto Johnson Creek, into the North Newport River, across St. Catherine's Sound, into the Bear River to Kilkenny Creek. All that in 65 miles. We gave the GPS's, the charts, and the binoculars a real workout. We arrive at Kilkenney Creek Marina to find a dock along Kilkenny Creek. I try and hook up shore power but my board indicates "reverse polarity" - so no electricity. Except, in a stroke of genius, I remember an extension cord. We hook up to a 110 outlet on the dock and have instant power to run our fan/sound machine. We ran the refrigerator and the cabin lights off the batteries. This morning, Sunday, Linda went to the marina office and made coffee in their microwave. Yum!! The marina is actually a fishing camp. We were told it is "rustic." That's a pretty accurate word for it. However, there was a nice restaurant within short walking distance. The no-see-ums continue to show their presence. Nothing else to say about it. Maybe we'll post pictures in the next post. Ken Next stop Beaufort, SC

Hello from Linda. After the friendliness and cleanliness of Brunswick, GA- I was a little taken aback by Kilkenny Creek. It did have a BEAUTIFUL 300 year-old live oak dripping with Spanish moss, and it was quiet. There were no showers, so you know the "princess" was not happy! Anyway, I told the guy that works at the ship's store- "This is our first time to GA, we really like it". He had absolutley no response at all- not even a changed facial expression! We went to dinner and the next table over was a high school prom- with awkward boys in tuxes and young "Stepford wives- in-training" girls- with beauty queen make-up & hair. More tomorrow- we're running out of allotted wi-fi time. Love to all- and please keep the comments coming! Linda