Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Thunder Gods on Mother's Day










Another sunrise departure crossing Charleston Harbor and back into the waterway. Today we had to revisit one of the locations that we ran aground at on the way south at Price Creek. But this time the water was at higher tide so we glided over effortlessly feeling much more confident and almost smug. It wasn’t the water levels on our mind today it was the forecast for some potentially severe weather – again. The thing about these thunderstorms here is that we are travelling through miles and miles of salt marsh. When you look around it kind of looks like we are floating on a little river in the middle of Saskatchewan wheat fields, with the ocean on the other side. In this situation our mast is embarrassingly high and seems a bit too attractive as a sky to ground conductor. It wasn’t until late afternoon that the sky opened up and the loud rumbles and flashes started. At this point we knew we were only a few miles from our planned anchoring spot but it was an agonizing few miles. The tidal current had switched and our gleeful 7 miles an hour was now a painful 3.5! For this stretch Christopher went down below to work at a computer game while Shirley and I took turns holding the metal steering wheel. What a lady – and on Mother’s Day and everything!! Fortunately the storm died down and we pulled into a lovely anchorage on Minim Creek. Everything settled nicely and we were able to relax and have a fun Mother’s Day dinner.
The next day we were again up before sunrise to spend the day travelling past Georgetown and up the Waccamaw river. This has lead us out of the low salt marshes and into a beautiful cyprus tree lined river. We pulled over once and dropped the anchor as a thunderstorm blew in and then continued on to an interesting anchorage at Bucksport for the night. At this spot there were a couple of little floating barge cottages permanently anchored nearby. Neat little things that I guess people rent as a fishing holiday. You can see two of them in the picture above, behind Tiffany Rose.

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