CHAPTER FORTY: DELIGHTFUL DAYS AND NOISY NIGHTS

CHAPTER FORTY: DELIGHTFUL DAYS AND NOISY NIGHTS

The most thrilling part of this journey on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is that each morning when you wake up, you are in for something totally new, stupendously beautiful, and knock-your-socks-off exciting. At least, that’s what you have to look forward to during the daytime hours, as you cruise south along the Carolina Coast. At this point, we’re enjoying the natural beauty of the South Carolina ICW. The birds are more plentiful – cormorants, pelicans, herons – I’ve listed them before. And they’re bigger and plumper than the North Carolina birds, like they had a much better fishing season or their water is better. The porpoises lead and follow Slow Motion through much of the day. When they appear it’s always a surprise – so we don’t have too many videos of them. They put on great shows, but if you’re not camera ready, you miss most of the fin and tail work.

On Friday after the “accident” at Myrtle Beach (39^th Blog), we cruised to our next stop at Georgetown Landing Marina along the Waccamaw River, which is in full fall foliage. The only thing that is not colorful is the Spanish moss (which, as you may recall, is neither Spanish nor moss). The Spanish moss has turned gray – that’s doing a disservice to what you actually see. It’s a very lacy gray, a hauntingly delicate gray, which makes the red and yellow leaves on the trees look even more vibrant. The Waccamaw River gives every boat a “tea moustache”, and Slow Motion still had hers from the trip north. So now she could really use a bleach job on her hull. We bought a few gallons of lemon juice, which we have been told will eliminate the moustache. During our month in Charleston we’ll have the opportunity to play with this chemistry and see if we can rid Lady Slow Motion of this manly accessory.

In the meantime, the Waccamaw is a treat that we are enjoying post-Halloween. Most of the ICW is narrow here, so you feel like you can put your arm out and a pelican will land on it, or you can shake hands/fins with a porpoise. We have been on the lookout for alligators, but despite the Admiral’s oft-repeated exclamation “Hey! Check out the alligator!”, when he points to logs in the water or on the shore, we have no confirmed alligator sightings to date (November 4). We saw alligators heading north, but I’m guessing that alligators hibernate or else they’re watching USC or Clemson football like everyone else in South Carolina (or dissecting the last game in a “study group”). The signs are still up warning us about alligators in the waters we are traveling, so I’m not about to dangle my toes from the swim board to try to prove or disprove my hibernation theory.

The weather is clearly fall, with a little bit of Indian Summer left. We started out from Myrtle Beach when the temperature was in the 30’s and we ended up 50 plus miles later in Georgetown, when the temp was in the high 60’s and we changed into shorts and flip flops when we got off the boat. Then today, we left Georgetown at 6:25 a.m., when the temps were in the 40’s (we lost an hour last night). And we arrived in Charleston some 66 miles later, where the temps were in the 70’s – again, once we tied up at the dock, clothes went flying every which way. Yes, it was a wild scene. But we stripped pretty quickly to summer wear. So even with the weather, it’s a surprise every day. Tonight, as I headed to find the bathrooms at the Harborage, I saw a little “heat” lightning in the distance. Not to worry, I thought, although thunderstorms had been predicted for this evening. Then a few drops of rain started hitting the dock and tapping me on the head and shoulders. Okay, not to panic, walk a little faster to the head. There will still be time to get back to Slow Motion before any deluge. These were my delusional thoughts. I made it to the head without being soaked. It took a while to get the combo to work (yes, 4 numbers can be very challenging). I hurried as much as I could. And when I got back outside to go back to Slow Motion (a walk across 8 different docks, connected in a maze of docks, maybe a quarter of a mile), score nature 1, Ann 0.

The thunder and lightning storm had parked itself right over my head and the rain came tumbling down, as the lightning lit my way back over the slippery docks to my shelter from the storm. I was drenched. Thank God we have a working dryer on the boat. The Admiral thought the whole scene was a hoot, as I ran in stripping the wet stuff off (we do a lot of stripping these days). He said naturally (and somewhat condescendingly): “You knew there was going to be a thunderstorm, didn’t you? You saw the lightning, heard the thunder, right?” I allowed as I had seen the lightning as I left Slow Motion – case closed for the Admiral. I’m just lucky he didn’t go into prosecution work, but not so lucky that he uses these latent, but highly effective, skills on me from time to time.

So tonight was pretty noisy for a time, what with the thunder and my wet screams. But that wasn’t our first noisy night after a serenely beautiful day (ignoring for the moment the occasional “dickhead” who tries to drown us in the wake of his testosterone driven speedboat). Oh no. Let me tell you about our noisy night at the Georgetown Landing Marina on November 3. The Admiral and I both have a sleep deficit from not getting in very many z’s last night. What happened was that a rogue boat with three rowdy young men – pirates or worse – headed for our dock around 8 p.m., when we were getting ready for bed. The Admiral went out to see what they were up to. Sometimes nefarious boaters “sneak” into a marina after hours, tie up, and leave early the next morning without paying the overnight transient fee. This appeared to be what they were doing. So the Admiral asked them what they were doing, and they quickly backed away from the dock and headed out again. Whew! We thought that was the end of it. But no! They returned to the dock, right across from us, just moments later, all three men shouting about who should do what with what lines. No one seemed to know how to dock. Whew! They won’t be able to tie up. The Admiral also told them that there was no electricity in the outlet, where they were aiming to dock. Undeterred, they bumped into the dock, and someone figured out how to tie a line to a cleat. And…welcome to the neighborhood.

Not more than 10 feet away from us three very loud men were yucking it up about something, maybe it was the booze or the weed. The Admiral asked me to call the dock master. He had obtained an after-hours number. I called and had to leave a message. The dock master called back in a few minutes and I asked him if he was expecting a late arrival, telling him also about the three knuckleheads that had just shown up and were making so much noise we couldn’t sleep. The dock master thought this was the boat that said it had needed repairs and would arrive late. He asked if I wanted him to come to the dock and tell the three guys to quiet down and/or to move to another location. There was plenty of space away from Slow Motion. I jumped on his offer, and he said he would be there shortly. I told the Admiral, who worried that the dock master would “blame” us for the noise complaint and raise the ire of the three revelers against us. So the Admiral went up to the office of the dock master to wait for him. He ran into a guy he thought was the dock master and asked if he had come to quiet the raucous, late-arriving crew. Turns out – oops – the guy he talked to was the “captain” of the pirates. They had a good laugh (heh, heh), and the captain said he knew exactly what we were talking about – one of his crew always talks really loud. The captain also said he would “take care of the problem”.

The Admiral came back to Slow Motion to report on his faux pas and his quick recovery.  He said the captain seemed reasonable. Then the dock master showed up and talked with the loud crew members for about 20 minutes. So much for getting to sleep. Turns out the dock master is himself a loud talker. After this lengthy chitchat, everyone seemed happy, including the Admiral, who returned to Slow Motion and told me we would be able to get some sleep. There would be no more loud noises.  Okay, I really wanted to believe this, and I really wanted to get some sleep, but the guys were too wired to stop partying right away. Still, I thought maybe things would die down in a half hour. The Admiral got up sometime later to use the head and came back to report: “OMG, they just welcomed 3 floozies on board!” Great. For the rest of the night, I tossed and turned, put my pillow over my ears, tried not to picture three floozies and three pirates ten feet away from me doing what floozies and pirates do. Nothing worked. It’s not that they were really noisy. It was just the anticipation that they could be really noisy, like when they first showed up, that ruined any chance of restful repose.

So as soon as we could get our tired bones out of bed this morning, at 6:25 a.m. (7:25 a.m. until today) we got the heck out of the Georgetown Landing Marina and cruised into another day of wonder and beauty on the ICW. More majestic birds, more playful porpoises, more lacy Spanish moss, more glass like water, more reeds and sweet grasses sharing the coastline with cypress trees and other firs. Even on little or no sleep, we fully appreciated these gems of the ICW. As we know, travel can be very enlightening, but sometimes, like today, it was enough that our travel down the Waccamaw River was extremely soothing for all of our senses. Tonight we hope to sleep like the logs we saw floating in the river, dreaming of soaring herons, diving pelicans, and acrobatic porpoises. And tomorrow we’ll greet Charleston with fresh eyes, ready to take in all the history, culture, and cuisine which this fair Pearl of the South has to offer.