South Carolina!

Now there's progress, another state.  But before saying too much about South Carolina, we should say we just got here and still don't know the first thing about South Carolina.  So really, it's fitting to reflect on Georgia, the state we just left.   And what a gorgeous place it is... just feast your eyes on the view from the water:

(click on photos to enlarge)

We really enjoyed a couple of places we stayed in Georgia.  First was Jekyll Island discussed in our last post.  The other was a marina called Isle of Hope Marina, near Savannah Georgia, which is very near the boarder with South Carolina.  

The people at Isle of Hope Marina were just the nicest people, proving you can run a business, provide a service and be genuinely, sincerely nice to your customers.  Who knew?  

Oh, by the way, here is our neighbor's driveway...

Besides being just damn friendly people, the Isle of Hope Marina provides loaner cars to the transients (that's us, we're transients).  That's right LOANER cars, as in FREE.  Boy did we take advantage of that!  We ran errands, did some shopping and sightseeing over the span of three days.  

Errands...  Let us explain what kind of errands you have to run when you're a transient.  Here's one: You go to Advance Auto to get four gallons of transmission fluid to flush the gearbox.  

Transients do this after their boat's transmission fails about 500 feet in front of the draw bridge that hasn't opened yet, and the river's tidal current is sweeping your home directly at the unopened bridge.  Before running this errand however, you must ANCHOR QUICKLY; radio the bridge tender to cancel your bridge opening request; cool down the gear box; add fluid; radio the bridge tender and request an opening; proceed to the marina with the nicest people on earth; remove the old gear cooler and replace it with the spare which you discover the old owner left aboard for just such an occasion (God bless you George!).  Then you run your errand for transmission fluid.  Twice though.  Because we transients don't buy the right kind on the first trip.

What else do transients do on errand day?  They go to Walmart just to find a bathroom scale and see if being a transient is a good thing or a bad thing.  They then take turns emptying pockets and removing shoes and sunglasses before weighing in, because hell! a half pound is a half pound!

Another errand would be to Best Buy where transients buy replacement Microwave Ovens when the 28 year old version just quits without even so much as a how-do-you-do...28 years? Are you kidding me?  That's all you got?  Geez!

We also used the free transportation to see Savannah's River Street and the old town, eat some really good seafood, and just be tourists.

But if there is one thing we transients do, it's transit.   We finally got a day with wind aft and strong enough to turn off the engine and just transit north.  At 9-10 knots!  Ahhh!  We could really get used to this.  

Today's sailing was rather brief though.  After 3 hours of motoring north along the ICW and out a really, really long inlet where the Savannah River dumps into the Atlantic, we sailed north for about 75 minutes, then motored 2 more hours into the inlet that leads to Beaufort (pronounced BEWFORT) South Carolina.  This route got us where we wanted to be without having to attempt a 65' bridge at high tide.  Moonshadow needs 66' which you can get when the tide is lower than "mean high water", which wasn't to be today at the bridge in question.  

See, sailing is really just a game of inches.