Underway at 6:30am this morning …without coffee!!!…in order to take advantage of the tides. We knew that we would have a touch-and-go situation while traveling through Meeting Reach. Meeting Reach is a dredged ICW canal that separates the Isle of Palms, SC from the mainland…tricky depths as low as 6.8ft, and that’s with 3-4ft of tide. We draw 5ft. No nav aids to tell us where to go to avoid going aground, so we had to zigzag with a close eye on the depth sounder. (Clearly, the dredging activities of the Army Corps Of Engineers cannot keep up with the sediment that is continually deposited as a result of the many inlets.) A sailboat behind us actually went aground. It was a falling tide, so she will have to wait at least 6 hours for a rising tide to be able to float off. We would have gone back to try to pull her off, as we did with the sailboat that was aground south of Daytona, but the boat was significantly larger than ours and we were concerned about going aground ourselves.
Another photo op…an isolated house along the salt marshes north of Charleston…do you think these people get out much?
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| Isolated house along the salt marshes of South Carolina |
At the other end of the financial spectrum, a multi-million dollar motor yacht passed us that same morning.
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| Motor yacht |
That day also provided us with the title for this trip report…”Horseflies?? REALLY???” Believe it or not, when you’re moving along with the wind in your face, you can still have horseflies swarming around you for hours on end! We were swatting those suckers and being stung by them all afternoon (including one brave fly that flew up Murph’s shirt!). Even bug repellant did not deter them. They were up to 1” long, looked more like cockroaches than flies. I wanted to get a photo of them in the cockpit, but, of course, the little buggers are fast. But then I opened the door to the head and saw one flying around. So I quickly closed the door, grabbed my camera, stealthily crept into the head and lay in wait for him to light so that I could get a photo. (For those of you in the Book Club who are reading Sick Puppy, I must say that I felt like Twilly Spree, though there were no dung beetles involved. :-) It did finally land on the portlight (window) in the head, and I got a photo (see below). I guess it’s a rather uneventful day when the major headline is “horsefly in the head”. :-)
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| Horsefly in the head |
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| Our neighbor in the anchorage, cruisers from Colorado |
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Minim Creek Anchorage Sunset
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