Barnacle Paella, Charleston Dress Codes, and SeaLight Souvenirs

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.

Half-Price Sushi, a Baggie of Cocaine, and Gwayne Sailing

Charleston, South Carolina – 1 mile by dinghy, 6 kilometres walked

By 9am we had finally reached Charleston, South Carolina and dropped anchor. The last hours of the trip were a killer as the wind had shifted north-east, directly in our face, which stripped a couple of knots from our cruising speed and made progress painfully slow. I was happy the passage was over.

After a morning nap, I awoke feeling much better and almost fully refreshed. Ana had received a text from our friends Wayne and Gwen (check out Gwayne Sailing, their YouTube channel), who we had hung out with back in Annapolis, and had met way back on the Erie Canal, the same day we met Kate and Ben from Waddington. Gwayne (their stylish combo-name) had upgraded from their monohull to a big, beautiful 45-foot Lagoon catamaran and had been in Charleston for nearly three months getting her all ready for their travels into the Bahamas. We took them up on their dinner offer and they picked us up at the dinghy dock at 4 pm. It was great seeing them again after so many months and miles.

Gwayne are experts in scoping out local places for eats and drinks, especially the ones with bombastic happy hours or food specials. And they had done so once again here, taking us to this weird yet awesome little indoor/outdoor pub hidden away in the recesses of a strip mall. And the reason they brought us here was for half price sushi night!

Well, the sushi was incredible, the IPAs were hoppy, the guitar troubadour was a speed picker, the conversation was excellent, and the bill was cheap. It was great seeing Gwen and Wayne again – they are funny, kind, have great stories, and seem to have friends in every city of the USA, including one here in Charleston who had loaned them his fancy truck. On the way out of the restaurant Ana whispered in my ear that she had made a fascinating discovery in the women’s toilet.

“I was sitting down to pee and saw a little bag on the floor,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, waiting for the punchline.

“So I picked it up and looked inside. I pulled out a small straw then two baggies of cocaine.”

“What?? Cocaine? How do you know it was cocaine?” I erupted.

“What else would it be? Look, I lived in Toronto for twelve years, I know what cocaine looks like.”

“Where is it?”

“I threw it in the garbage?”

“You what??”

“I threw it in the garbage,” she repeated, all cool like.

“Why didn’t you keep it? We could have partied and done disco with Gwayne tonight or sold it to one of the dock kids or fed it to the shore pelicans and watched them get all wide eyed and crazy!”

“Don’t be dumb. Unless you want to go pick it out of the garbage, it’s gone. And I wouldn’t recommend sticking your hand in the bin – there was some nasty stuff in there.”

Gwayne drove us back to their new boat for a sundowner and tour, and our prospective coke-snorting disco party was instead a pleasant evening fueled by regular old alcohol and nicotine in the form of beers, wine, and two lovely cigars Wayne and I smoked. Their new boat is massive, with four large cabins with walk around beds and their own individual heads and showers, two additional small cabins for crew (as this is a European ex-charter boat), a fly-bridge helm, large array of solar panels with more coming, massive covered cockpit area, two large trampolines at the bow, plus a comfy seating area, and a luxurious indoor galley and lounge area. It is a magnificent boat and a hulk of a beast with a 75 foot mast, meaning a no-go for the 65 foot bridge limit on the ICW, so Gwayne will have many offshore runs in their future. The highlight of the tour was when Wayne pulled out a plastic Tupperware container, full of excited, crawly, muck-covered bait crabs. Ana immediately started naming each of them and as I fell into a horrible vision of us walking out of there with a pocket full of new pets. Fortunately, Wayne replaced the cover of the habitat and hid it away in the cupboard before Ana could adopt them.

After our excellent visit, Gwayne gave us a lift back to the dinghy dock and after a moderately sketchy midnight ride across the bay, we were safely back in SeaLight after a most interesting day.

How to Track SeaLight. And More Charleston.

Charleston, South Carolina - 12 kilometres walked

Most cruisers are using a mobile app called Noforeignland. The folks from sailing vessel Hope’s End we met up with the other day – John and Becca – told us about the app before we started our trip. We only really started using it after the Hudson, but it’s turned out to be an extremely effective tool for us. The app is quite straightforward. You set up your boat name and details, write a short paragraph about who you are and your sailing mission, then you can either have the app automatically track your movements, or you can manually check in at each new location, which is what we have been doing. The content in the app is all user generated so when we are heading to a new location we can see a lot of current detail that is simply not available anywhere else – where is the dinghy dock, is there a garbage there, where is the closest laundry and grocery store, which anchorages are good, and so on. We are also able to follow other boats we meet along the way and the app lets us know when their location has changed and how many miles they are away from us. The other thing I’ve recently started doing is initiating chats with boats that are already anchored at a place we are thinking of going to and asking how the anchorage is and how they like the location. In fact, one of the boats I did that with here in Charleston invited us over for drinks and we had a great time with them – Nathalie and Philippe from Montreal. This is yet another example of how technology has really changed the game and vastly improved the information availability and ease of meeting other boaters.

 

If anybody would like to see where we are and watch our progress just install the Noforeignland app, search for “SeaLight” and then follow us. You can also just use the website too if that's easier or you might even be able to click this link to go directly to our boat. The app looks like a total mess when you first log in, but once you search for a boat or drill into a particular area, it cuts down the clutter. Give it a try, it's pretty cool and will give you some insight into just how many cruisers are out here chasing the sun.

 

Back to Charleston. Today we walked the Battery, which is a long walkway that extends all the way around the southern edge of Charleston and passes by dozens of classy antebellum (like that fancy word? It means “pre-war” – I learned it here) houses. This neighbourhood oozes refinement, character, and great wealth, some of these old money riches undoubtedly earned on the backs of the African slaves bought and sold here. We left the Battery and wandered through some of the small ancient streets, on slate sidewalks, finding even more decadent houses, one which looked like a slightly smaller version of the White House and had two fake looking, but real grapefruit trees hung heavy with fruit. We’ve also noticed many houses have what look like gas-powered fire lanterns on their porches, stoops, balconies – really everywhere, and I managed to get close enough to one to see the thin, copper gas line running to it, which was rather surprising to me as that sort of thing would be deemed a major fire hazard in Canada and immediately outlawed, despite the old world class it radiates.

 

Our walk lasted a long time, long enough to build up hunger pangs and when I suggested to Ana we return to the French restaurant for lunch again today, she didn’t hesitate one second. From here we visited the historical society’s museum and learned more about the dreadful yet fascinating history of this city, then stopped in at our new favourite American coffee shop – Bitty & Beau’s, which we were thrilled to discover had a location here. Ana is so supportive of this place that she bought a seven dollar chunk of Rice Krispie cake to go along with our coffee. It was delicious and provided a week’s worth of sugar ration for each of us.

 

I remained there doing some route planning and gnawing on the cake while Ana left to shop King Street. She was doing some sort of interactive show and tell thing with Stella from the stores, as she wanted to get in on the shopping too, but she’s super cheap just like Ana so I think they just drove each other crazy instead of having a fulfilling hybrid shopping experience.

We walked back through town and along the way our dinner plans got thwarted. Adrian was going to come for dinner on our boat but his toilet had exploded so he was elbow deep in the poo poo and asked if we could postpone. Instead we found the sailing vessel Fulub and had a drink with Philippe and Nathalie in the super cozy cabin of their 1995 Dufour 39’. They seem to be on a similar schedule to us so I expect we will see them again real soon.

Charleson, South Carolina. And Making My Wife Laugh.

Charleston, South Carolina - 4 kilometres walked

At 4am the winds finally dropped to below 10 knots, providing for a much gentler ride and by the time we reached the inlet at Charleston the waters were glassy and a small pod of dolphins was there to greet us. I had an hour long nap in the cockpit while Ana watched the helm and I felt surprisingly good after that, considering I’d been up since midnight.

 

We anchored in the Ashley River then I got out the bucket and gave SeaLight’s decks a good salt water scrubbing while Ana cleaned up the cockpit and cabin. The water here isn’t nearly as brown as most of the ICW up to this point, but still I’m hoping for a good rainshower to give her a fresh water rinse.

 

By the time we left in the dinghy, the ebb current was raging along at 3-4 knots so we powered against that into the dinghy docks at the Safe Harbour Charleston City MEGADOCK. The dinghy dock must have had at least 20 dinghies jammed in and we could not find a space for ours. Instead we started tying up to the nearby bridge connecting the main rigid dock to the floating dinghy dock, but a local who passed by said that was a bad idea as he’d seen dinghies squashed and punctured beneath the bridge as the tide fell, and the tide rises and falls a full six feet here. Fortunately, a guy returned to his dinghy and left, which opened up a space, and we were able to ram, jam, and cram ours in. I also had to walk to the main marina office to pay the $5/day usage charge, and it was a very long walk due to the size of this marina.

 

After the long ocean trip our goal today was modest – get groceries. We walked to the Publix grocery store which was less than a mile and stocked up on things we needed. During our walk I noticed some big differences here – we are now seeing rows of fully grown palm trees and Ana even spotted a little green lizard sunning himself on a concrete step. Beaufort felt like our first baby step into the south; Charleston feels like we’ve arrived. The temperature was also a balmy 23 degrees, which felt even warmer after Ana showed me the picture my Mom sent of the results of a big snowstorm in Saskatoon last night – six inches of fluffy white snow covering everything.

Back at the boat, we received a call from our friend Adrian from Kingston, Ontario. He and his wife Sara are in Charleston for a few days so we made plans to spend the day with them tomorrow which is sure to be a blast.

 

What I really wanted to write about today is making my wife laugh. I think a lot of husbands spend a great deal of time and energy trying to get a laugh out of their wives, and I’m no exception. But Ana’s not easily entertained or impressed. She gets this from her mom. Maria is such a sweet lady but man, is she hard to impress. But who doesn’t enjoy a challenge? A few days ago Ana and I were at a grocery store and wandered through an aisle with all those easy to make cake mixes. As her birthday is coming up, we decided to buy two so we could have a tester to make sure it turned out, ensuring her birthday cake is spectacular. As I had also been on the lookout for a secondary anchor for the boat, I suggested I buy her a fabulous Danforth for her birthday, you know, like a real special nautical gift. She didn’t even crack a smile. In fact, I think I was threatened with violence. That night when we were having a phone call with our relationship councillors Ben and Kate, I mentioned the idea, and said the anchor would be a symbol of our steadfast love – sturdy and immovable. Ana didn’t laugh. Neither did our councillors. They just said it was a bad idea.

I often use the power of dance to get a laugh. I can sometimes get a chuckle out of her with a surprise Macarena, a sloppy Moonwalk, or sometimes the parts of The Ketchup Song dance I can remember, but usually she’s just embarrassed because I’ll do it at the grocery store or at one of her art exhibition opening galas.

 

One move that’s a sure hit that every guy knows is twirling your penis like a helicopter and making the rotor sound, like at the beginning of MASH, then pretending the power of the dick rotor is pulling your body around the house. That always gets a laugh, but you can’t overuse it, and doing it in public spaces is really frowned upon by the authorities, not to mention the general public. I didn’t invent that one. I think my brother told me about that move years ago, as he found reasonable success with it getting wife giggles.

 

I have some tough competition for humour. And that competition would be her phone. She’s always laughing at things on there, usually memes sent by Magnus or Stella, often about cats or dogs or monkeys or little kids getting knocked over. The other day she was laughing at one reel that had a series of little kids looking at a frog then the frog jumps up and sticks to their face and they freak out. It was pretty funny. But the memes she’s into recently is this weird little woodchuck-like creature called a Hyrax that makes this awful screeching noise, then overlaid with lines like, “When I see my sister wearing one of my shirts that still has the tag on it.” I know, sounds dumb, and it is. But she laughs at these every morning. But I don’t know how to make memes. I’m thinking I should learn.

 

What I really rely on is my writing. I write early in the morning before Ana is awake so I have time to try and build some humour into my journals. I’ll sometimes peek at her from around the corner when I know she’s reading one, hoping to get a grin, a chuckle, or the ultimate – a laugh out loud. Sometimes I do, usually I don’t. She’s a tough customer, but I love her and I will keep trying to tickle her funny bone.

It seems the best laughs I get from Ana are the unintentional ones. Yesterday I made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch during our bumpy ocean ride. I am not a particularly particular person, but I do like to eat my grilled cheese sandwiches a certain way. I squirt a pool of ketchup on my plate then right beside it I squirt the exact same amount of mustard. The sandwiches need to be cut in half, preferably corner to corner. I then alternate dips between ketchup and mustard and enjoy every bite. Well, I had also chopped up a bunch of vegetables and after grabbing a cucumber slice I accidentally dropped it into the pool of mustard. She burst out laughing. And laughed even harder when I fished it out and ate it.

Maybe I'm trying too hard.

28 Hour Ocean Run to Charleston

Wrightsville Beach to Charleston, South Carolina  – 124 nautical miles sailed

We had a decision to make. At this point in our journey we had the option to either continue along the ICW into South Carolina, passing through Myrtle Beach, Georgetown, and a number of other smaller towns, or we could take a 124 mile, 28 hour ocean passage directly to Charleston. The first option would be safer, but much slower, and one big problem was that there didn’t seem to be much of anything for anchorages and few marinas for the first 60 miles. Besides that, we were told that the stretch of ICW between Georgetown and Charleston is very shallow in spots, so we could foresee this being even slower as we would have to time our passages with the tides.

 

The other option had its problems too. First, there were 15 knot south-west winds forecasted for the day, which we’d be taking right on the bow so there would be no sailing and we’d have to motor all the way into two foot waves which means rising and crashing and general boat pulverization. Secondly, we had to pass through the Cape Fear inlet to get to the ocean and there would be an outgoing tide meeting the incoming wind, which is a recipe for tall and dangerous standing waves that can sometimes be impossible to get through.

 

We agonized over the decision, especially me. I was honestly scared to take the inlet as I expected the worst conditions. But after seeing the parade of boats heading our way on the ICW this morning I had my doubts we’d be able to find a place to anchor for the night. So what did we do? Well, seems like I sometimes do learn from my mistakes because I found a marina that was located right at the start of the inlet and called them to ask what the sea conditions were likely to be getting out. One of the staff was happy to speak to me and said there would be some rough water stirred up by the waves and tides, but not terrible so he didn’t think we’d have any trouble.

We decided to take the inlet, and if conditions were scary there or out on the ocean, then we’d simply turn back and proceed along the ICW. Yes, it could have cost us a few hours, but the potential time savings we’d achieve with an ocean run could then be spent exploring Charleston, which was especially appealing as the weather forecast for the second half of the week looked dicey and not great for travel.

The inlet was rough to be sure, and scary for a moment or two when standing waves nearly brought our boat to a halt, but we made it out and the ocean condition in the open water away from the inlet was acceptable. So we set the autopilot and started the first of many hours crashing through the waves.

As the sun dropped below the horizon and darkness fell, I realized how utterly terrifying this moment would be for somebody who had not done overnight passages before. First, darkness on the ocean or in the middle of a giant lake is not the same as land darkness; there is no ambient light. You cannot see the shape of the waves. You cannot see any potential obstructions in the water. And the only indication of land are the twinkling lights that look very, very far away. Add to that the noisy engine (and the fact that you are relying completely on that one engine) and the incessant and distressing pounding of the boat hull against the waves, which sometimes sounds like the boat is being ripped in half. At that moment of dusk we were about 25 miles offshore, there were no boats in sight, and we hadn’t seen one since leaving the inlet, so one feels very much alone.

 

We’ve opened an invitation for friends and family to join us for parts of this trip. But after what we’ve experienced so far, I really don’t know how enjoyable it would be for a visitor. Sure, the cities have been great and some of the small towns are nice, but the long days on the water can be grueling, monotonous, and offer very little of interest to see. So for the visitor’s sake, I’d say that the city visits would be best, but it is difficult or impossible to time these with any level of accuracy. For example, we didn’t think we’d be reaching Charleston for at least a week from now, but we will be arriving tomorrow because of the decisions we made to take advantage of favourable weather windows. If we had missed some of those windows then we could have been arriving in Charleston a week later than we’d estimated. Before starting the trip we were overly optimistic that we’d be able to work this out for visitors, but we’ve realized it is very difficult, which is probably why none of the other boaters we’ve met along the way plan to have visitors. This should get somewhat easier in the Bahamas as we will be situated in a smaller area for about two months, and we do have friends booked to come at the end of February, which we are very excited about.

I will finish this journal off by noting that the ocean water temperature is now 23 degrees C and just a couple of days ago it was 19.5. It seems we are headed in the right direction.