Sue requires that interesting clouds along the way be photographed.

We got away from Savannah at 9:20 AM Wednesday September 3 with a little help on the dock from DeFever club members Jim and Ann who were also staying at Hinckley. Weather was good and the 9 o’clock low tide was past and starting to rise as we entered the dreaded Field’s Cut. This is a narrow channel that, like much of the ICW (stands for Intra Coastal Waterway) has not been maintained and has become silted in in places. A number of people told me to watch out for it. If we did get stuck with the tide rising we should float off in short time.

We did feel that sudden slowdown as we hit bottom once but then floated right through and had no other incidents. I used some apps on the iPad to avoid most of the hazards. How did anyone ever sail a boat without all the apps and electronics we have now? I would not want to try it. There’s even an app for anchoring. If the anchor drags and the boat starts to move where it should not, it wakes us up. Solving an anchoring problem in the middle of the night in what is likely a stormy gale is not my idea of fun, but it beats winding up in someone’s front yard in a stormy gale.

We arrived at a fuel dock and topped off, then over to Lady Island marina in Beaufort, SC at about 3 PM. After a little docking drama we tied up. The drama was due to my ineptness since this was the 2^nd marina we have been to since our training captain left, but also to the marina manager shoehorning us into a side tie just half the length of our boat with a strong current pushing us back toward the boat just behind. I should have just refused and gone somewhere else.

I think I have a way to handle that docking situation now, and it’s not the way I did it then. I don’t like bashing our boat. I like even less bashing someone else’s boat. They are often much newer, much larger and far more expensive than our boat, although in this case it was smaller than ours, and even it did not fit into its half of the dock. Turns out I did just touch the other boat, but fortunately not enough to qualify as a bash. Not going to do it like that again. I don’t care what some of these experts on the dock tell me to do.

We spent 3 days in Beaufort, seeing a historic homes. One of these is open as a museum, although not of the class of those in Savannah. Several others are very elegant B & B’s where we could go inside. We saw an impressive lighthouse (10 floors!) that still operates. Parris Island marine base, where all recruits west of the Mississippi and all female marines are trained, has a museum where we spent the most time in Beaufort. Both of us enjoyed it and learned a lot, Sue especially. Marines have been just about everywhere and done just about everything, at least if it is difficult and dangerous.