Unexcused Absences East Coast Cruise - Week 3 (he said)

East Coast Cruise – Week 3 (he said)

by Kent 17 Nov 2015

November 8 to November 14, 2015. The previous few days’ perfect weather had to come to an end sometime, and sometime came Sunday morning. The forecast high for the day was actually at 1am, and by dawn it as cold and windy with rain squalls. Heather did a photo shoot with Lynn for her post about French scarves on her website Southern Fried French. Ron seemed to vanish once the scarves came out, but I gamely played the part of fashion photographer. Very easy on the eyes, my job, photographing two beautiful women.

My scarf models, Lynn and Heather

After the shoot I drove over solo to the Patriots Point park and museum, which has a bunch of displays related to various wars. They have a Vietnam War immersion experience (didn’t bother with that one – didn’t know whether the “immersion” included tropical insect bites and diseases), a Cold War memorial that was a scale model of a ballistic submarine buried in the ground, and my main reason for coming, a World War II destroyer, submarine, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown.

Engine room controls deep inside the Yorktown

Forward torpedo tubes on the submarine

The carrier Yorktown, submarine Clamagore, and a random cruising catamaran

Spoiler alert; the ships are awesome. I could have spent a week just crawling around the carrier. They let you in to all kinds of spaces, including the engine room, flight deck, bridge, combat information center, plus all the living spaces for the ~3,500 crew. Both the flight deck and the hangar deck are filled with vintage and modern warplanes.

View from the Yorktown’s bridge

The sub, the USS Clamagore, was built right at the end of WW II. She never saw action, but nevertheless gives an eerily accurate impression of what life was like on a sub during wartime. The destroyer is the USS Laffey, known as “the ship that would not die” because during an engagement off Okinawa in early 1945 she was assailed by an air strike of 22 Japanese bombers and kamikazes. Five kamikazes and three bombs struck the ship, killing 32 and wounding 71, yet somehow the crew shot down 9 planes while frantically fighting fires and keeping the ship afloat. Fantastic stuff if you have any interest in WW II or military hardware.

Part of the helm station on USS Clamagore

Sunday evening Heather cooked a delicious crock-pot meal (chicken marbella) and we hosted Lynn and Ron in our spacious salon onboard Miss Adventure. It’s so incredibly random that we met this delightful couple in France after being fans of their website, and are now good friends and can visit them on two continents.

Dinner onboard “Miss Adventure” with Lynn and Ron

The weather was no better Monday, so we stayed at Lynn and Ron’s dock and worked on boat projects, did some provisioning, and got some internet work done. Since Ron is interested in buying a boat, I thought I’d treat him to some “real” boating, so I invited him down to help me change the oil on the two main engines. The procedure is pretty straightforward, but it takes almost 5 gallons of 15W-40 heavy-duty oil to complete the procedure. Fortunately Amazon ships the exact oil I need in 2.5 gallon jugs, and shipping is free with Amazon Prime (bonus!).

Tuesday we left around 10am, and after navigating the treacherous Elliott Cut with 4-knot current against us had a nice 2-3 knot following current all the way to Bass Creek. The scenery south of Charleston is fantastic, lots of salt marshes and clumps of pine trees all around the ICW.

A fishing boat returning from the ocean

Wednesday we left early (for us; 8 am), and arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina, promptly at 10am. The Beaufort in South Carolina is pronounced “Buford”, as opposed to Beaufort, North Carolina, which is pronounced “Beaufort.” Whatever. Our timing couldn’t have been better, because as we were tying up we heard the distinct sounds of a marching band. We walked out to the main street just in time to catch the town’s Veteran’s Day Parade.

Veteran’s Day parade in Beaufort, South Carolina

We would have like to have stayed longer, but we hoped to get to St Simons Island, Georgia, by Friday afternoon so we could visit Dave and Suzanne, friends from Virginia who recently retired and moved south. We cruised another 4.5 hours (passing the gorgeous homes of Hilton Head) and arrived at the Wright River, near the South Carolina/Georgia border not far from Savannah.

Serious waterfront real estate near Hilton Head

After dinner I stepped outside to check on something and saw fireworks in the distance; there was probably a Veterans Day display going on in or near Savannah. And as if the fireworks weren’t cool enough, I heard loud breathing all around the boat. After the initial “what the heck is that” wore off, I realized that the sounds were from a huge pod of dolphins feeding around our boat. I called to Heather and we watched the fireworks and listened to the dolphins hunt for fish for about 10 minutes until the finale (of the fireworks, not the dolphins).

Anchored near Savannah, Georgia

Next, on Thursday, we motored south to Walburg Creek, but not before some anchor-retrieval excitement. We normally tie a small buoy to the end of the anchor, both to mark the anchor’s position (for us and for other boaters), and to give us a way to pull the anchor out backwards should it snag on something. This is all good and well under normal circumstances, but with the 9 foot tides of this part of the south-east, the boat swings back and forth several times overnight as the current switches with the tide.

Anchored up a creek with this sailboat

In this case, the anchor line had snagged the buoy line on one of the current switches, so the buoy was no longer visible in the murky water. And wouldn’t you know, halfway through raising the anchor I heard a gentle thump from the direction of the port prop. Sure enough, the anchor came up with only about 10 feet of yellow 1/4 inch line (of the 20 feet that was there last night), and no buoy in sight. No visible buoy meant it, and about 10 feet of line, were wrapped around the prop. At least it took until Thursday this week to have our Mechanical Problem of the Day (MPOD).

Fortunately slack tide was approaching when we anchored in Walburg Creek, so I put on my wetsuit and snorkel and dove on the port prop. At first glance it looked like a complete tangled mess, but it only took about 6 or 7 tries to free the line and the destroyed buoy from the propeller. Fun factor; 1 out of 5, annoyance factor; 3 out of 5. It actually wasn’t too bad, the water was 69 degrees and at slack tide the current was very light.

The mangled anchor buoy after its encounter with the port prop

Our only deliverable for the rest of the week was to get to an anchorage on the Frederica River, off St Simons Island. We anchored directly opposite the small dinghy dock maintained by the National Park Service. Fort Frederica was on the frontier between the British colony in South Carolina and the Spanish colony in Florida, and was the site of two battles in 1746. In both, the British were successful in protecting St Simons Island from the Spanish invaders, and that was it; by the war of independence thirty years later, the fort was abandoned.

Sunset off Fort Frederica

The dock is on a mud flat that is exposed for the last two hours before and the first two hours after low tide, so we had to time our shore visits with the eight-foot tides in mind. By the time the tide had risen enough to get to shore, it was 6:15pm, and we were hungry. Our friends Dave and Suzanne picked us up at the park gate and we went to the Southern Soul BBQ joint, a former gas station and now hole-in-the-wall that serves delicious (and regionally famous) home cooked southern BBQ. It’s right up there, classic BBQ-wise, with the Hickory Hut in Salina, Kansas.

Remnants of Fort Frederica

Saturday we moved the boat about an hour west across the ICW and the salt marsh to the Hidden Harbor Yacht Club, definitely not a “Yacht Club” in any New England sense of the word. But they have a great reputation, and we wanted to scope them out as a possible place to park Miss Adventure for the summer while we visit our French canal boat, Après Ski.

We finished Week 3 with an exciting (for me) series of boat projects with their resident mechanic, Alan, who spent several hours onboard helping me with a few things I was too intimidated to tackle on my own. Coming up in week 4 we’ll spend some more time with Dave and Suzanne, and then continue in our quest to reach Ft. Lauderdale by Thanksgiving.

East Coast Cruise – Week 3 Numbers