aPhantom.net East Coast 2012 Part Two
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We planned to stay about four days in Hilton Head. That would be enough time to rest up, replace the broken mainsail block, clean up the boat, and sample our favorite restaurants. Marina fees are something like hotel fees. Stay two nights, get the third night free, stay over Saturday and get free parking, etc. It was only a few dollars more to stay a week and basically the same price if you stayed two weeks. We had also arrived during the steamiest heat wave in years with the heat index about one hundred five degrees every day. An extra week with the air conditioner running full time was beginning to sound pretty good, so we decided to settle in.
The complex at Shelter Cove has six restaurants right at the marina. There are also some shops and a small ship's store. There are also tour boats and charter boats. You can rent paddle boards and kayaks. You can go dolphin watching or deep sea fishing. There's also a small boat that takes visitors into the creek for crabbing. These customers are locally known as "chicken neckers" because of the bait they use for crabbing. There is a free trolley that takes visitors to the beach, to any of the hotels in the complex or to one of several tennis courts or golf courses. If you can't find something to do here, you are just not trying hard enough.
Part of the marina shares space with Disney time share condos built on a small island. There are about one hundred rental condos that they somehow managed to build without disturbing the old live oaks and other natural beauty of this small space. It's a very family friendly place and we marveled at all the vans and SUVs in the parking lot. It appears the American family no longer travels by car, opting to move by truck instead.
The marina promenade contains a small stage and outside seating. A guitarist entertains under the gazebo every week night singing songs for the kids. He's been doing this for years and has quite a following. About the sixth night of "Flying Purple People Eater" and you wonder how he does it. Now I have that song in my head and can't get it out.
Every Tuesday during the summer, there are fireworks. A barge has been permanently anchored in the creek to launch the show. This is a big event and draws a large crowd for the local merchants. We were there for the Fourth of July Extended Edition so it was quite a show. The best place to watch is from a boat out in the creek so that was a good excuse to get out our inflatable dingy and test out our recently repaired outboard engine. The engine needed a few adjustments but soon we were on our way.
Two restaurants in the complex have nightly guitarists at the outside bar. Combined with the kid's show, you are never out of earshot of live music as you stroll around the marina. We were very impressed with the quality of the musicians and they seemed to have a different entertainer nearly every night. Since we already had the dingy in the water, we also sampled three more restaurants just up the creek, also with nightly entertainment. This was becoming "eat and drink your way through Hilton Head".
We found a replacement block for our main sheet and changed some of the rigging to try to prevent a recurrence of the broken block. We also had some concern about the stuffing box around the rudder post. This is basically a hole in the bottom of the boat that allows a large round shaft to connect the steering wheel to the rudder. Typically, these are wrapped in a rope-like material that compresses around the rudder post and thus seals up the hole while allowing the rudder shaft to turn. We have always had some leakage from this spot and it was on the "we should fix this some time" list. It's a typical boat project that requires completely unloading several lockers, working upside down where only your left hand can barely reach the offending part. As we were fully loaded with fuel and water, the boat was somewhat lower in the stern than normal. Add to that the following seas we experienced on the trip from Jacksonville and we had a large enough leak to set the bilge pump off about once per hour when we were under way. It takes five gallons of water to fill up the bilge enough to set off the pump, so suddenly this project moved way up on the list. An entire day of trying to wrap some gooey packing material around the rudder post with no success made us start re-thinking our next move. This needed more than additional packing material.
The only way to really fix the problem was to haul the boat out of the water, slide the rudder and shaft out from below the boat, clean and repair any damage to the assembly, re-pack and re-install the whole thing. We needed a boatyard to accomplish this feat. After a few "we were just in the boatyard, why didn't we fix this then" moments, we decided to make our way about twenty miles back south on the Intracoastal Waterway to Thunderbolt Marine, a proper boatyard just out of Savannah.
We made our way out of Hilton Head early on a Saturday morning. As we only had a short distance to go, we decided to have a short sail on Calibogue Sound to test out some of the rigging changes. The Sound is really more like a really wide river with very few shallow spots. It's between barrier islands so it's protected from most wave action. The land around it is called the Low Country (very aptly named), so there's not much to block the sea breeze. All in all, it's a great place to sail. We actually were sailing just for fun, not just to get somewhere. What a concept!
We arrived at Thunderbolt Marina at about three in the afternoon. This is a small marina with only two long docks and serves as a sort of staging area for boats that are going to the boatyard for repairs. The boatyard itself is a huge complex with a special marine railway that is able haul out boats nearly two hundred feet in length. There is a large central building with four huge bays about one hundred feet tall, one that is able to be completely sealed and climate controlled for painting. Yes, this was definitely a "proper" boatyard.
On Monday, the yard foreman arrived to evaluate our problem and on Tuesday morning we were hauled out for the second time in a month. They were actually able to slide the rudder out of the bottom of the boat the same afternoon. Not wanting to spend the night in the boatyard in the hundred degree heat with no air conditioning, we got a rental car and a hotel for the night.
The next morning the job was done and we were back in the water before noon. The captain was very pleased with the job and the total charges were actually less than the estimate!
Since we already had a rental car we decided to make several more trips to the hardware store, West Marine, grocery, liquor store, the usual stuff. A few more projects were off the list and we were ready to move on.
We left Thunderbolt on a Sunday afternoon and motored out the Wilmington River. We left on the outgoing tide with a planned destination of Charleston, SC. We hoped to sail overnight and arrive at the Charleston Harbor outer marker just after dawn on the next morning. The weather was perfect once again with Southwest wind at about ten knots. There was only a sliver of a moon and it lasted just a couple of hours. A small cloud covered part of the moon and it looked just like those Halloween pictures with the witch riding past the moon. Once the moon set, there were too many stars to even pick out a constellation that we recognized.
We were making excellent progress, averaging about six and one-half knots. The only problem with this was that we would arrive at Charleston Harbor at about four a.m. with about another two hours of darkness before daylight. To slow our progress, we first lowered the main sail completely but were still making five knots under headsail alone. We kept rolling in the headsail to reduce the sail area and our speed. Once again, it just didn't seem right to be "wasting" all of this perfectly good wind.
We finally arrived at the outer light at about five-thirty a.m. It was still completely dark but now we began to see some navigation lights for ships entering Charleston Harbor. As it turned out, it was like a highway with four ships coming in, one ship coming out and a tug towing a barge outside of the channel just to make things interesting. As Charleston is a major port the shipping channel is very well marked and several miles long. There was plenty of water depth for us to sail just outside the channel but it was a bit unnerving to be that close to this many huge containerships in the total darkness. The fourth ship in line that was entering the port called us on the VHF radio just to confirm that we were staying outside the shipping channel, which we assured him we were definitely planning to do. He informed us that he was the last ship for a while so we breathed a sigh of relief.
By now, the sun was up and we were able to make our way into the harbor without any more traffic. We made our way to the Charleston City Marina on the southern side of the peninsula that makes up downtown Charleston. Once we were secured and checked in, it was time for Bloody Marys and Shrimp and Grits, a perfect southern breakfast!
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