CHAPTER FIFTEEN - SLOWING DOWN IN BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA

CHAPTER FIFTEEN – SLOWING DOWN IN BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA

We had planned to cruise from the slow pace of Isle of Hope, Georgia to the more rapid pace of happenin’ Hilton Head, South Carolina on Friday July 6. As we studied the location of the marina in Hilton Head vis a vis the activities in Hilton Head (bike riding, beachcombing), we realized that we were going to need a car to take us anywhere on Hilton Head Island. Otherwise, we would stay at the marina (at a rather steep price) and see nothing of Hilton Head except the swimming pool at the marina. Since part of our goal is to actually visit the places where we dock, we re-evaluated and decided to skip Hilton Head on our way north. Instead, we went straight to another slow-paced town, Beaufort, South Carolina. That’s Byoo- fort.

We had the chance to look at Hilton Head from the ICW, and much of Hilton Head came to us, in the form of parasailors, jet skiers, water skiers, flying speedboats. And this was Friday – imagine the traffic on Saturday! Hilton Head looks like a huge Club Med. It just so happens to have beautiful beaches and dunes and miles of bike trails. (But isn’t that the formula for successful Club Meds? Those things and tequila or rum, I guess.) I’m not a golfer, nor is the Admiral, so no critique of the famous golf courses is forthcoming. I’d still like to see it, if someone could please turn the volume down a little on all the motorized boats and vehicles racing all over the waters and sands of Hilton Head.

We did not descend into Hell (see prior blog) on our excursion to the Downtown Marina of Beaufort. We had a long day ahead of us, going from Mile 590 to Mile 536 – 54 miles are a lot for us in one day. So we departed at 8:20 am expecting to arrive in Beaufort around 4 pm at the earliest. But the currents were kind and we arrived and docked at the Downtown Marina of Beaufort at 3 p.m. We left Isle of Hope and there was no wind – It was hot as Hades. It was still hot at 3 pm in Beaufort, but there was a wind and there were very strong currents. The wind was blowing toward the dock, so it was an aid to us in docking Slow Motion. We had good help at the marina, although Michael was smoking a cigarette while tying our lines. That was another reminder that this is the South – land of tobacco.

What was the ICW like on the way to Beaufort? There were a lot of sounds – the Calibogue Sound was big and deep. There had been a shoaling problems at Fields Cut hear Daufuskie Landing, but that was recently dredged. Before that, we went through Walls Cut on the way to the Wright River, and we had no problem. Both Cuts were described in one of those scary yellow highlighted paragraphs in our navigation book. When I see yellow, I read very carefully, and I tell the Admiral what the book says is dangerous about the area. He’s already researched our route the night before. But once we’re on the waterway, we keep exchanging information as we look at the charts. And boy, are the currents tricky in this area. Sometimes you have currents coming in and going out at the same time, so the two currents slap together, high fiving like old buddies. And we get slowed down.

We were warned that we could go right past the Downtown Marina of Beaufort if the current was strong that afternoon. We had had a similar problem at Isle of Hope, so we had a little bit of experience under our belts. It’s amazing how one or two lines can help bring this 20 ton boat into the dock, thanks to the great steering of the Admiral and marina staff on the dock. I help out by throwing the lines directly to them, rather than dropping them in the water, and I put the fenders down before we dock, so that Slow Motion does not rub its beautiful fiberglass finish up against a strip of hard rubber on the edge of a wooden dock. It’s a team effort, and we’re getting better as a team.

We did not go past the Downtown Marina – we docked without a hitch. And I ran for the showers, although I was totally wet from perspiration. I wanted a different kind of wetness, lukewarm water, and a chance to shampoo my hair, which gets matted, wet and stringy during every day we travel. Art compares my hair, not unfavorably, to the hair of Phyllis Diller. If you know that reference, you’re “of a certain age.” As we head north, the showers are getting better and better, for the most part – clean, lots of warm and hot water, lots of hooks for clothing –still no bathtub for me and my bubble bath. But we cleaned out our bathtub on Slow Motion, and but for the fact it is about 3 feet long, it looks pretty inviting to me.

After the shower, I explored a little bit of Beaufort, in search of the perfect smoothie or milk shake. The downtown area is filled with little shops and art galleries, plus a few restaurants. I was about to give up in my search for the refreshing beverage, when I turned a corner and saw Kooky Mooky’s advertising what I wanted. I literally ran to the door – it was about 4 p.m. – and the place was closed! Technical difficulties! So I started heading back to one of the restaurants, hoping there was a milk shake on the menu. This time I took the brick walkway by the river, and I found the restaurant Plum. I told the bartender I needed a refreshing drink, and she offered sweet iced tea or nonsweet. I opted for nonsweet. She left the bar and returned with a tall cup with lots of ice and iced tea. I asked the price, and she said, “just take it.” I ran out of there sipping my free iced tea, feeling like I had won the Lottery. Then I realized how pitiful I must have looked, but no matter. The iced tea hit the spot.

Just a word of caution: Stay away from marina stores for the most part, except the one on Jekyll Island, where they charged me 85 cents for the most delicious Fat Boy ice cream sandwich. Anywhere else, at a marina store, an inferior ice cream sandwich is going to cost you between $1.40 and $1.80. It was $1.40 at Beaufort, AND the lady admonished me to leave the store immediately to eat it. No food allowed in the store, not even what they sold. This is so funny, since their store was an ice box, and the ice cream would have never melted inside it.  But as soon as I hit the outside, the ice cream flowed. Still, it hit the spot. This lady also asked me if I had gotten the iced tea at the marina store – I mean, really, they had no iced tea. Was she really going to charge me for something she knew she didn’t sell?

Now for the really, really good part of our visit to Beaufort. I have a friend in California, Kalah Bumba. She had given me the contact information for her brother, Dee, and his wife, Cleo, who have lived in Beaufort for 30 years – transplanted Yankees from Chicago. I called them and we arranged to have breakfast on Saturday. They took us to the café where “all of Beaufort has breakfast.” Dee had Cajun shrimp and grits. Art had a spinach and Swiss omelet, and now wishes he had ordered that instead. I had a plate with one scrambled egg dwarfed by the plain grits that covered ¾ of the plate. These grits tasted like farina. It’s okay, but pretty tasteless. Meanwhile, Dee was enjoying grits with garlic, onions, peppers, sausage and shrimp. He had learned a lot about dining in the South in his 30 years there.

After breakfast Cleo showed us the Bay Trading  Company building, where their friends had opened a book store, which sadly is no longer open. Cleo had worked there. And all the famous authors from the Lowcountry (the name for this area of South Carolina) would come and do book signings, like Conroy and Cromwell. With their royalties alone, couldn’t they amuse themselves and treat the rest of us to the pleasure of a non-chain bookstore by subsidizing one in Beaufort? Couldn’t they? Do book stores really have to make profits, when successful authors foot the bill? Just asking.

Cleo told me that Beaufort was steeped in history, and the leaders of Beaufort had played a key role in seceding from the Union. I walked around town after our breakfast together, trying to learn more about historic Beaufort. I came across St. Helena’s Church, which the British had used to stable their horses during the Revolutionary War. There are British officers buried in the church cemetery with Union Jack flags next to their headstones. There are also Revolutionary soldiers buried here, with the American flag of the 13 colonies next to them. And there are confederate soldiers buried with the confederate flag next to them. I’m not sure about any Union soldiers, but probably a few made it into this welcoming place.

I also came across the Congregation Beth Israel temple on a side street, a demure white wooden chapel with a sign announcing its presence. I do not know its history, but it confirmed my visual assessment of Beaufort as a having a very diverse population. This is the first town in the South where Blacks and Whites appeared to be well integrated and acknowledge each other’s presence. Cleo told me a story about how when she first arrived to live in Beaufort, she was rushing down the main street, as Yankees are wont to do, and an older Black gentleman just put up his hands and said “Slow down! There’s no reason to ever be moving that fast!” And she slowed down and has enjoyed the slower pace ever since.

So I slowed down and stopped to read all the bronze plaques that described the history of Beaufort from 1530 to the present day. I didn’t know that the Spanish had been here, and the Huguenots as well. Sir Francis Drake made a mess of things for a while in this area, but ultimately the British settled in. And Beaufort became a thriving part of the colony of South Carolina. There was no attempt at a utopian society. Slavery was big here from very early on. There was an entire dock operated by the major slave trader – still hard to grasp the notion of treating another human being as property. But of course, as a woman, I realize that was the lot of women and children for many, many centuries, and laws treating us as property were still on the books in the 20^th century. Our right to vote isn’t even one hundred years old yet.

Beaufort sent its own native son, William Heyward Jr. to the Continental Congress, and he signed the Declaration of Independence (all MEN are created equal). But, of course, as we know, that did not include the folks that had been forced into slavery. And Beaufort had their share of dead confederate soldiers fighting to keep people enslaved. Oh, yes, there were other reasons why South Carolina seceded, not just slavery, but slavery cannot be overlooked.

Very close to the historical plaques I heard a young Black man do what sounded like an original rap. He sounded angry, then anguished. I drew near. And he used some profanity (that’s how I was sure it was rap), then he started rapping about someone named Samantha, who made him very frustrated, but there was an O Henry twist to his tale: he rapped that maybe he was Samantha. There was an audience of about 10 people sitting on a cement wall listening to him. It brought me back to the present. The audience was mixed race, and they were captivated by a Black teenager who was apparently having a huge identity crisis. Beaufort is historic, but Beaufort is up to the minute modern too. I’m not trying to paint a rosy picture of Blacks and Whites living in total harmony in Beaufort, but, dang, from my foreigner’s superficial view, they do seem to get along. Probably the churches are still segregated, as everywhere else. Still, it’s nice to be some place where society is ostensibly not drawn along lines of color. 

We left this “Little Jewel” of Beaufort to head for the “Big Jewel” of Charleston early on Sunday morning. I mean 7 a.m. We were going to break the 70 mile barrier, so this required lots of preparation by the Admiral. He studied all the tide charts and wrote down a whole page of when the currents would be against us and when the currents would be with us, depending on when we hit certain mile markers. There were some cuts with shallow water to be aware of on the way, but nothing billed as dangerous as the Little Mud River. I know this will surprise you, but we are getting about 1 and ½ miles per gallon of diesel fuel. That’s correct. We are aiming for 3 miles per gallon, which would be a personal best for Slow Motion. So the Admiral tries to keep the engine at a certain level to maximize our fuel efficiency (if that’s what you can call 3 miles per gallon). In trying to keep the engine from working hard, we have to keep our speeds down. When we keep our speeds down, we move very slowly – that’s why we’re Slow Motion. But if we have favorable currents going our way, we can pick up several knots. That’s right – a maritime term thrown into the discussion. This “knot” thing is pretty complicated. Art explains a “knot” as one minute of latitude. Is your head swimming yet? Mine is. And a “knot” is also 1.15 miles. Knots are used in nautical calculations because they are equal to one minute in latitude. So it’s a good thing to increase your “knots” – more minutes of latitude= greater speed. Asleep yet? Just read this before you go to bed – guaranteed as effective as Nyquil.

Luckily we had the currents with us much of the way to Charleston today, Sunday July 8. And we arrived at 3 p.m. This was our first experience with a bunch of “Sunday drivers” out on the waterways between the suburbs of Charleston and the Charleston City Marina. What a mess! There are people in power boats pulling little kids in giant inner tubes or floats at high rates of speed. What if the rope breaks? The kids could go flying over and hit our boat or someone else’s boat. There are young boys out with their 12 packs. There is the show-off water skier jumping the wake right in front of us. And there is that whole school of power boaters who subscribe to the mythical doctrine that the bigger the wake, the bigger the – you fill in the blank. We had some lovely peace and quiet going through some cuts with marshes on both sides. But the Sunday boat traffic disturbed that serenity.

One strange episode along the way. Somewhere we picked up a few trailing sea gulls. They were following us, flying over our wake. I thought perhaps we were churning up something edible for them, but Art said they were waiting for a handout from me. They had mistaken us for a fishing boat and mistaken me for someone who is likely to feed the birds. I went down to the sun deck to take some photos, as a few sea gulls had increased to a few dozen. Then suddenly a huge pterodactyl came swooping into the group of gulls and landed on the water waiting for a handout. Actually, it was an opportunistic pelican. I got some photos, but stopped taking pix, as every time I held up the camera, the gulls and the pelican looked ready to come aboard and grab it out of my hand. It’s green, you see, and could be mistaken for bird food, I suppose. Those gulls were persistent and didn’t leave us alone until we got to the land of crazy boat drivers. They don’t abide that craziness either.

Charleston City Marina has a megadock. That is, it has a floating concrete dock which is 1500 feet long (more than 1/4 mile). There are megaboats along this dock (our neighboring boat from the island of Bebe Rebozo appears to have a paid crew of six and three 100 amp power cables leading from the dock), and then there is Slow Motion, which has one 50 amp cable. We got an inside position this time. Last night we were on the outside (riverside) of the dock in Beaufort and we rocked a lot (also, those damned sheepshead seemed to have followed us from Jekyll Island). So we got our wish, and there was a guy on the dock ready to help us tie up. What can I say? The Admiral did admirably again – this time against both a strong current and a strong wind blowing off the dock (the worst kind). After securing the fenders and the lines, I headed for the showers – only a quarter mile away in withering heat. And tomorrow we get to explore Charleston. Hope the sheepshead haven’t followed us from Beaufort. When the last sound you hear before falling asleep is a gnawing sound on the bottom of your boat, it leads to bizarre dreams. In one, I was trying to get away from a tiger, which had the ability to make wooden doors rubbery and crawl under them. I won’t even tell you about the really crazy ones. And so to bed.