Charleston, South Carolina – 2 miles by dinghy, 13 kilometres walked
This morning we walked Charleston, eyeballing the magnificent architecture, photographing interesting doors and courtyards, watching the small packs of tourist being led by local guides on bikes, on foot, by trolley, and in horse-drawn carriages. There are indeed many tourists here, but the visitor industry seems to thrive seamlessly alongside the locals doing their regular thing.
Gwayne met us at the dinghy dock at 1 pm to join us for lunch on SeaLight. I collected them in the dinghy and took a couple of full ocean body blows from waves stirred up by the brisk winds. We’d been telling them yesterday that the television in our main salon had been misbehaving so, of course, they showed up with a tightly packaged 32” gift television they’d been trying to find a new home for, along with three or four others, all part of the effort in consolidating their holdings from a recently sold family home, plus their previous sailboat.
Ana cooked a delicious paella though, sadly, we no longer had fresh Bahamian lobster or conch to add to it. Instead, at low tide we’d scraped a few dozen barnacles off the marina’s dirty dock pilings and found a very recently deceased mud turtle near shore, which supplemented the dish with palatable and fiercely authentic local flavours. We all enjoyed the paella, maybe them more than us. Ignorance is bliss, particularly when it comes to surprise meals.
We spent a long time in SeaLight’s cockpit with our buddies, having drinks and telling stories. They had expected to have made it to Bahamas months earlier, so were feeling like they’d missed the best part of it. But we stressed to them how unstable the weather had been recently and that they were going to be arriving for the best sailing months of the year, from April to the start of July, when winds weaken and stabilize to the east, temperatures click up, days are longer, and anchorages become less crowded. Of course, they had to get the hell out of there before hurricane season, but that gave them three months to explore – plenty of time to have a good look around.
I must now describe guest protocol on SeaLight, before recounting what happened today. Ana and I have had many, many guests on SeaLight and we always show them a good time, unless we don’t much like them, in which case will take them out sailing in heavy winds, heel the boat dangerously until water is splashing into the cockpit and the guests have twisted lips, trying not to shit their pants or lose their cookies. Then they never come back. While fun for us, those guest experiences are rare; we generally like everybody.
What happens is guests who visit SeaLight have such a magnificent time that they will often swipe a souvenir of their visit. Sometimes it’s a fork or spoon, often it’s a towel, at times they chip out a piece of teak trim, and some have been known to steal a fender, or a decorator pillow (and God knows there’s plenty of those on the boat so they’re rarely missed). One time we caught Ana’s cousin with a roll of custom monogrammed SeaLight toilet paper shoved down her pants. Another time our buddy Andrew stole one of my metal band concert shirts, and I think he wears it at home when he’s down in the dumps and pretends to be me, which really cheers him up. I get it, people just don’t want the good times to end and on SeaLight, we party like it's 1999. Good times guaranteed. Today’s visitors Gwen and Wayne were no different and snagged themselves a souvenir on the way out. But what made them unique is the brazen manner in which the theft was undertaken. As Wayne was stepping into the dinghy, he reached back and busted our Canadian flag pole right off of its base, then tried to hide it in his pocket but the pole poked right out the bottom of his shorts and down his leg – he wasn’t fooling anybody, so he just sat there waving it around and smiling. Never seen anything like it. But I do think there was something else at work here. With the US leader’s recent shenanigans, I think Gwayne wants to join the Great White North and become fun loving, slingshot-toting, syrup sucking, apologetic hosers just like us. And who can blame them? Certainly not us. I’m hoping we can find a new flagpole in the next port.
Once we were back on shore we all jumped in their truck and they dropped us off downtown as it was on their way back to the luxury catamaran. We said a quick goodbye, but not a final one, because with this sailing business, you just never know when paths may cross again. And again. And again.
Ana and I walked as far north as we could go on King Street, and it rolled a hell of a lot further than we expected – endless blocks of bars, restaurants, galleries, shops, parks, and well-dressed people everywhere. The volume of college students is incredible - packs of them everywhere, with clearly sizeable budgets considering the fancy drinks and meals they enjoyed in the dress-coded bistros and eateries. One place we passed was a margarita bar, with a dozen spinning cells of different coloured iced drinks, whirling like front loading washers, then poured into fancy glassware for twenty bucks a hit. A sign titled “Dress Code”, hand carved in marble, hung prominently beside the entrance, expressly forbidding open toe footwear (guilty), t-shirts (guilty), short pants (guilty), and vulgar slogans of any type (not guilty, I’d left my “Orgasm Donor” shirt back at the boat), and a whole bunch of other banned stuff, half of which I didn’t even understand, but certainly got the impression we weren’t welcome so kept on walking.
We eventually walked ourselves out of downtown and out of energy so returned to the boat. While Ana was making a tray of cheesy, vegetably baked nachos for dinner, I took the limb of driftwood I’d found on shore, grabbed my favourite whittling knife, and began crafting a new flagpole.
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