Charleston or Bust!

Hello and greetings from Charleston, SC!  Since Swansboro, NC we’ve been out on the trail just about everyday, all day. Did a few 50 mile-ers, passed by all sorts of weird and interesting stuff, anchored out in some wild and remote creeks, and met all sorts of great folks. Our time in Charleston has been so full I think we’re gonna save the juicy tidbits for a later post. Here’s a few anecdotes of what we’ve been up to between here and there.

Spent a fun afternoon is Swansboro hanging out with the Brooks, family friends of Ryan’s. I very much enjoyed hearing embarrassing childhood stories about my beloved.

Did a little lite rain motoring.

heeeeeeeeeeeeeyy

After stopping in Wrightsille Beach and hanging out with Ryan’s Aunt Diane, who kindly cooked a homemade dinner and let us use the washing machine (thanks Diane!), we witnessed a baptism on the shores of “Snow’s Cut,” on our way to the Cape Fear River.

Mast rainbow

Anchored in Calabash Creek, just over the South Carolina border.

Motoring through the South Carolina low country was surreal. We were in a large bay, about half again as big as Mobjack Bay back home, you could see trees on the shore of the mainland about 3 or 4 miles away, but the whole bay was filled with marsh grasses 4 or 5 feet tall. It felt like we were driving the boat through the African savanna! As we came out of the bay we passed this tow- it was about 1/4 mile long and consisted of about 10 barges carrying dredging equipment. The scale of it was unreal.

While tied up to the free town dock in Southport, NC, we heard this guy in a canoe calling out that his paddle had just broken. There’s a fair amount of tidal current in Southport, so he seemed a bit perturbed. Anyways, I hopped in the dinghy and towed him to the dock, then rowed him out to his boat so he could get his keys so he could get another paddle. If you think I look silly towing a canoe with “Bug,” then it looked even more silly with two grown men in our tiny dinghy.

Graham’s Creek, I rowed up the marsh and took a picture of Ryan and “Firefly.” This was a pretty cool anchorage…we saw wild boars, heard a dolphin swimming around us at night…and then the wind and tide shifted against each other and “Firefly” couldn’t decide whether to face into the wind or into the current, so she sometimes did a little of both, or one, or the other, all night. We didn’t get much sleep.

We hauled up the genoa for a little motor-sailing down the ditch behind Myrtle Beach.

Goin’ through a bridge…I feel pretty baller stopping traffic in the pursuit of leisure, lassitude, and languor.

Breakfast did not look like the picture on the packaging…I had fun riffing on this all day.

The journey so far! We’re having an absolute blast in Charleston, we’ll let you know what we’ve been up to soon! Thanks for following along.

 

Ryan snagged this one while I was trying unsuccessfully to snag a fish…no photo editing required.