Jan 9-10, 2023 McClellanville ,SC to St. Augustine Fla
McClellanville gave us the best it had to offer. At first glance it was just fuel and a dock with electricity to keep us warm overnight. Then we found very fresh shrimp and a main street lined with sprawling old oak trees that have stood long before any of the houses were built in the early 1800's. The houses tend to be old too, but the trees are on a completely different scale.
We are told there are about a hundred residents here. We were met by a broad sampling our first night here as the residents gathered together on the dirt circle that fronts the dock. This seems to be the habitual way to start Saturday night. We stood out as the cruisers who just arrived that afternoon, the news of our arrival as obvious to everyone as our unfamiliar faces. We were welcomed with conversation and offers of golf cart rides to fetch what ever we might need from the stores we learned are thirty minutes away. It was there in the dirt lot standing surrounded by our aquaintances that it was decided we would stay another day.
We had intended to go for brunch Sunday at the one restaurant in McClellanville, one we were told was a real highlight. But after morning tea we got busy with a few boat chores and a load of laundry (never pass up a laundry while out cruising). It turned out that the washing machine was having trouble moving through its cycles. Getting the laundry done ended up taking hours. The people gathered at the house overlooking the dirt lot overlooking the fuel dock kindly nursed the machine through its struggles and even transferred our clean clothes the dryer.
Our boat is the only craft in the entire harbour that does not call this place home and fish for shrimp for a living.
We left McClellanville just after sunrise and headed out of Five Fathom Cut, one of our favorite shortcuts. The day started out with plenty of wind, driving 9 kts, and we were feeling good about making progress. Around 10AM the wind died back to next to nothing and we were motoring again most of the day. Sigh.
There are some sights that never lose their fascination for me, and we encountered two of them today. In the afternoon we looked up to see a pod of dolphin swimming just under the trampoline at the front of the boat. They were racing us quite a while, leaping out of the water and doing a quarter turn to get a look at us. Lois went to the foredeck and laid down to watch them. The water was crystal clear, so she could watch them while they were underwater as well as when they surfaced for a breath. This was repeated several times the next day, and it never gets old.
The second thing appeared after dark. The bioluminescent plankton started flashing as we passed. It's large patches of green blinking "flashlights" or lightning under the water's surface, It's fascinating to watch, but at the same time it creates this subtle primal unease and I start looking around expecting to see aliens in a UFO. I wonder what very early sailors thought about lights under the ocean? Surely those kind of phenomena are the origins of merpeople and kracken and other salty tales. Anyway, it was an excellent show.
Tuesday we were able to do some decent sailing part of the day. We ran the watermaker (desalinization unit) to make fresh potable water. We filled our tanks which were mostly empty: we'd been usig our boy/girl scout camping skills to conserve until we got to a place we could regenerate It can be dome underway, but takes seas that don't have too much swell.
And of course we baked our daily bread in a just rightsized quantity for consumption before it turns to hardtack in the sea air.
The dough rises tucked snugly in its covered bowl in the sun until late afternoon baking
On our second night at sea the sun set in a blaze of red & gold, and a couple hours later we were hunting for the "A" sea buoy to enter the St. Augustine inlet. We carefully picked out way past the red & green channel markers- there was a lot of glare-y light from the city, plus there were extra red & green lights from holiday decorations on businesses and cars driving along the harborside streets. The mooring field aas so empty that at first we weren't surewe were jn the right place. It's usually crowded with boats, but we are ond of 5 in the entire south field.
We found our assigned mooring fairly easily, and got lines run in a short time. The current was running strongly, so catching the mooring line was slightly tricky, but we executed well. Then applause broke out on a nearby harbor tour boat that had held back to watch. So now we are part of the spectacle of St Augustine.
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