To Hilton Head and Beyond

For us one of the advantages to being on this coast was being close enough to just pop by to visit with our friends in Hilton Head.  Many of you reading this will remember Kurt and Ann our dear friends who moved down to South Carolina almost fifteen years ago.  Leaving Savannah we were just a short day's travel from Hilton Head and we were excited to spend some time catching up before moving further north.  There is nothing quite like spending a perfect day with old friends and ending it watching the moonrise over the ocean.

Moonrise over the Atlantic

Sadly the time came to move on and we headed up to Beaufort for the evening.  Beaufort SC is one of our favorite stops, unfortunately this time we were only able to spend a day before moving on again.  What a fun day it was though.  As we pulled up to the dock we were greeted by a voice saying, "Is that Captain Larry driving that boat?" and we saw the smiling faces of Terry & Lola aboard Sunny Days that crossed the Gulf of Mexico with us.  The dockmaster was down on the dock to move a couple of boats to make room for us so of course there was some good natured kidding about if they should take our lines or not since, you know, they don't allow troublemakers here.  They determined that we had been "approved" and we enjoyed a nice evening visiting and learning where each other had been since Dunedin.  Thanks Lola and Terry!

Once again we were saved by the kindness of strangers.  We had walked about half a mile to Publix to get some coffee - which, of course, we had forgotten when we were doing provisioning in Hilton Head.  As we were starting back it started to rain, we weren't totally unprepared because we had the foresight to carry our slickers, but as we were crossing a side street a woman in the intersection rolled down her window and asked if we would like a ride to the marina.  A little surprised I replied, "sure if it isn't too much trouble", and, of course, it wasn't so we got a lift and by the time we were back (which was maybe two minutes) the rain had quit and we didn't even get wet carrying things down to the boat.  We continue to be blessed by meeting the nicest people.

The next day found us moving on again and that night we had our last anchorage in sawgrass country.  Tom Point Creek, about halfway between Beaufort and Charleston, is a favorite spot and it was just as pretty as it was the last time we were there seven years ago.  We like it because we often see a lot of dolphins there.  Back when we were fairly new at cruising a local fellow out for a evening boat ride with his little grandchildren told us that many porpoises come to this creek to give birth and then they raise their babies here and teach them how to feed by herding fish into a corner for them.  We didn't observe any feeding behavior this trip but it is still lovely there.  We didn't see another boat and thought we had the whole place to ourselves until we were leaving the next morning and saw a sailboat anchored a couple of turns closer to the waterway than the spot we like.

We only had a short distance to go after we left Tom Point Creek to get to a marina just outside of Charleston.  We didn't linger in Charleston though because we have friends expecting us in North Carolina and we still wanted a couple of days to anchor and hang out a bit further upstream.  The following morning found us motoring past the Battery as we moved through Charleston Harbor on our way to the ICW to continue north.  Normally we anchor the first night out of Charleston, but thunderstorms were forecast and that is a very open anchorage so we moved along as quickly as we could - with the help of a little 'push' from the tide.  We spent the night safely tied to a dock in Georgetown, SC (waiting for thunderstorms that never came) before we  headed up the beautiful Waccamaw River.   More about that next time.