We get thrown into the deep end of boat ownership, we’re on our own to deliver our catamaran up the ICW. We’re going to have a lot of “firsts” in the next two days.

10.19

We were up at sunrise today. We have a total of about 100 miles to cover, so we’re not sure if we can do that in two days or three. The goal is to get as far as we can today and then decide if we will arrive in Charleston on Friday or Saturday.

A few hours after leaving the dock we made it to Beaufort, which was our fuel stop. I was fighting wind and current to dock the boat, when suddenly we got behind the dock and most of the wind was blocked. We came in a little hot and bumped pretty hard but it was only a fender. I told the dockmaster it was my first time docking and he said he’d seen way worse, but we were in Beaufort SC – this man was Southern-nice, so he was probably just trying to make me feel better. They let us hang out for fifteen minutes or so while we waited for a bridge to open, then after that it was just a race against the sunset to see how far we could make it.

We covered about 65 miles today, which is way more than either of us were expecting, we’ve only got 35 miles left so it looks like we’ll be pulling in to Charleston tomorrow.

Oh, so tonight was our first time anchoring. I think we did pretty well. It took a while to get the bridle figured out, but the anchor set and things are looking okay. It was really hard to figure out which way we would swing since the current and the wind are opposing and we don’t yet know which has the bigger effect. There is another cat anchored ahead of us but we didn’t swing the same way they did. We swung more towards the lee shore. In fact, quite close to the lee shore. Close enough that Kyle is going to wake up around low tide to make sure we still have water under the keels. We shortened up the scope a bit to limit our swing radius, and it’s not supposed to be windy so things should be okay. Either that or we’re going to learn another hard lesson.

There are a ton of no-see-ums here and our screens aren’t fine enough mesh to keep them out (found that out the hard way too, they’re swarming me as I’m writing this). Still, today went well. We covered a lot of ground, we successfully docked and anchored. And tomorrow we’ll be home!

10.20

We did swing a little bit last night, but not any closer to the shore. I don’t think either of us slept well, but neither of us got up in the middle of the night – a quick glance out the window was all we needed.

We had the anchor up and were underway by sunrise. It was cold! We were in shorts and tank tops for most of the ocean passage, but that gale must have been a cold front. Temps have been much lower ever since.

We did have one weird thing happen today. There was something big in the water, it turned out to be one of the channel markers. We tried to hail the Coast Guard to inform them of the floating marker, but couldn’t reach them. Then a boat passed by us and told us the CG was trying to hail us on VHF – we couldn’t hear them at all. So it looks like we are transmitting okay but not receiving over a large distance.

Today was full of familiar scenery, since we’re so close to Charleston, the rivers and bridges are all local territory for us. There was only one opening bridge that we had to pass through today, it opens on the half hour and we barely missed the 11am opening, so we hung out in Elliot Cut for half an hour. That cut is known for extremely swift currents and it’s a pretty narrow channel, but fortunately we were only fighting a knot and a half of current rather than the 4 knots listed in the guidebook.

We were aiming for about 3pm at Cooper River Marina, aka slack tide, because Charleston is known for its strong tidal currents. Despite our best efforts, it was closer to 1pm when we arrived. It felt like we were in Charleston Harbor forever, partially because we were fighting an outgoing tide (making 3-4 knots headway), plus it’s a big harbor. As we neared the marina we hailed them to see what they thought about the current situation and they assured us we could pull right in, so we did.

So this is home for the next month. We paid for our dockage, met a few neighbors, and then a friend came to pick us up and take us back to the house.