As we approached Myrtle Beach, SC we continued to see new homes being built like crazy along the ICW. Here a lady saw me with a camera so she waved to us.
We stayed the night at a free dock at Barefoot Landing in North Myrtle Beach. Although there were many restaurants to choose from, there were no stores with groceries. We had run out of Cheddar cheese and were out of luck. I walked across the road and went to a McDonalds for the first time in ten days, and it tasted great!
We had to raft up to other boats. This was the rule for the use of the free tie-up. We ended up rafting up to one boat which itself was rafted up to a boat which was tied to the dock. In other words, we were 3 deep. A lot of people liked to stop here.
Cruising Note: Free docks do not have water or electricity, so you get what you pay for. The best that they can offer is a place to dump your garbage.
The next morning we awoke to visit with our neighbor more. He was from Silver Springs, MD. He had owned some pizza restaurants and proceeded to tell us about how he got in a shootout with a robber at the pizza place. He had his 357 Magnum aboard. He got shot through both thighs. Wild!
I visited more with his wife the night before while Erich gave him a tour of our boat. His wife had done massage theory for years. They held a dinner party with two other couples, a sort of pot luck. It was a nice quiet party.
We got underway a little after 7 AM and headed deeper into the Carolina woods and swamps.
Myrtle Beach is sure growing. New homes were advertised "from the 80s to 120s". A golf course had an aerial tramway to cross the ICW to move between the parking lot and the course. Here was one of the nicer new bridges we saw.
Here is an older home as we got further from the coast.
When we entered wider rivers Erich would sit on the front deck and leave things on autopilot.
Each bird has its own post.
I got a neat little Motorola V120e cell phone with Verizon before I left. It allows free unlimited calls between Beth and me. Here Erich got a shot of me talking to Beth from the flying bridge, the best area to talk from with its better cell tower reception.
We called it a 72 nmi day at Awendaw Creek, near McClellanville, SC, where we anchored for the night. We pushed pretty hard most days, going from dawn to dusk. We entered the low country, where we were in the middle of nowhere. It felt very remote. There were tons of mosquitos, and the temperatures had spiked to over 80°F in the daytime, 15° warmer than usual for this time of year. It never got cooler than 77°F at night.
The next day we went past the Isle of Palms and then got to Charleston, where we went past Fort Sumpter, where 52,069 days earlier the civil war had started on April 12, 1861.
Fort Sumpter still has a sort of confederate flag flying, as well as the US flag and the South Carolina flag.
This is the famous waterfront at Charleston. I stood on the steps of the large white church in 1979 when I was on my mission to South Carolina many years earlier. These homes are in the millions of course, but they rarely sell: they have stayed in families for many generations. We continued on and anchored at Rock Creek at 4:26 PM.
The next morning we were in dense fog, but the Furuno radar made it easy to continue on.
It is surreal cruising in fog. Everything feels like a dream.
Later we stopped in Beaufort, SC when we finally found out by cell phone that there was in fact a marina that had Cheddar cheese! We stopped at Lady's Island Marina and from there walked a quarter of a mile to the Winn-Dixie supermarket. It is a real treat to go into an actual decent grocery store, the first accessible one since the start of the trip! I bought Pepsi, Erich bought hooch, and we bought more zucchini, more romaine lettuce, and of course, Cheddar cheese! At checkout I asked for the food to be double bagged so that we could carry it back to the marina. The man in front of me overheard and offered to drive us to the marina in his pickup truck! He said that this was the way it was supposed to be everywhere. We thanked him profusely. True Southern hospitality.
On past Hilton Head island, temperatures were warm, but the scenery pretty.
Last updated: 2003.11.21.