Day three on the ICW - attack of the greenheads

Our second night of anchoring on the ICW was considerably smoother than the first night, relatively speaking. We anchored in Toomer's Creek, near what appeared to be a houseboat and, of course, a smattering of crabpots. Since Beezlebub the Larger was the anchor that seemed to finally get us set the night before we toyed with the idea of trying a Bahamian mooring using both the Beezlebubs. Why we thought we could get two anchors set when we couldn't set one the night before is a question for the ages, but still, I was game. Well, game also being a relative term. I won't bore you with all the details, because there are more agreeable things to ponder, but I think this is when my anchor-loathing truly began. On a more pleasant note, we had chosen a beautiful spot on this night. We were ready with our bug defenses, including an awesome screen, and had plenty of daylight for anchoring and prepping. The sun set across the water and marsh grass in a rosy glow as we prepped for the night.

When I went down into the main berth I heard a strange and unnerving crackling sound. At first I had visions of the paint cracking off the boat in great swathes and then some distant part of my brain said snapping shrimp. Brian later heard it (the noise, not my brain) and asked, in an only somewhat alarmed and what-the-heck tone, what was making that noise? "Is something chewing on the boat?" We could hear it from everywhere inside the boat and it was particularly loud when we were at the front inside of either hull. "I think it's snapping shrimp" I told him in a fairly confident tone. We could see no physical evidence of activity outside or of paint peeling away so we dismissed it and went about our preparations for the night.

I was still nervous about the anchoring, and still rose multiple times during the night to check our position, so it was still a fairly sleepless night for me while the Cap'n slumbered loudly next to me in spite of all my efforts to get him to take turns checking the anchor. But we were more relaxed about our departure the next morning, since we were actually off the official ICW and didn't have to worry so much about being mowed down by another vessel, and had time to take in the soft beauty of the morning. Egrets waded in the water around us again and I also spied two small fins swimming near the marsh grass. A baby shark having a little breakfast near one of the crabpots. Being a shark aficionado, I hoped the little guy would stick around but after a moment it disappeared beneath the surface and was gone from view. This was the kind of time that made me fall in love with the water all over again.

I had somewhat mastered the art of making coffee in a percolator on our small Coleman propane stove and managed to engineer a breakfast of coffee and oatmeal as we got underway. By the 3rd day we had come to realize that navigating the ICW was cake. We could even have our Maemomapper going on Stanley, my Nokia, and just follow the pink line. Depth wasn't much of a problem for us since our draft is only about 2'. We were averaging a stately 5 mph and I was able to fairly accurately predict when we would arrive somewhere by tracking the time we passed the statute miles. I had a state-of-the-art tracking device for this called, in some parts of the world, a notebook.

A combination of ease, exhaustion from lack of sleep, and brainmelt from the heat had worn away my nervous anal-retentiveness. I even missed checking the time at a few points. Most of this day was spent figuring out how to spend less time and energy ducking from one hull to the next a hundred times in an hour, trying to keep cool, admiring the scenery, and worrying about anchoring that night.


And then there was our combat with what we now know is the dreaded greenhead horsefly. Somewhere near Georgetown, SC, these ferocious flies began to invade the boat in droves. At only 5 mph, or slower, we couldn't outrun the dastardly beasts. They were immune to our bug spray and judging from how many hounded us I think we may have been the only blood supply for miles around. Every venture into the interior of the boat was accompanied by crazed swatting and frantic flailing, inspired by their nasty bites, in an effort to kill them or, at the very least, get in and out without one landing on you.


Our only anchorage choices as we neared Winyah Bay were either very close or too far away to make during daylight, so we began the anchoring process around 5:30 that afternoon. We found a likely place called Duck Creek. I stood on crabpot watch with the binoculars as we motored into the creek and was dismayed by what I saw. The creek was a veritable minefield of crabpots. Every inch of shallow water was filled with them. As we neared the opposite mouth of this short creek I saw yet more crabpots. Cap'n weaved his way through them as I called out their locations. I stood up by the mast and scanned the horizon of the larger creek ahead and saw ahead....more crabpots. I was stunned. They were literally everywhere. Some Mad Crabber had lost his mind and exploded crabpots across every inch of shallow water.

We were limited by the amount of chain and rode we had on our anchors so we couldn't anchor just anywhere. 15' was our minimum depth. We finally found a spot that seemed shallow enough and had somehow been neglected by the crazed crabpotter. The tide was running fast and hard. I had my usual difficulties with the Beezlebubs. "Has the anchor touched bottom?" Brian called out. I'd try to count out the feet of chain and rope as I lowered the bloody heavy thing into the water. I waited for some obvious sign that it had touched the bottom, but there was nothing obvious about it, and I couldn't realistically count because it was hard enough just holding onto the thing with my reduced musculature. "I don't know! I can't tell!" I called back. He gave me a look. I stared down at the water where the chain disappeared beneath the surface, willing it to give me some sign. When no sign was forthcoming Brian came to the front of the boat and stared at it himself. We wrangled together with the anchors and finally felt it was possibly set. We stared down at the water together. The boat would move, the anchor rope would turn at odd angles to the boat as it moved, not at all in the place we would expect it to be, but we seemed to be staying basically in place. The anchors were now becoming almost living entities to me. And I loathed them.

Since we anchored so early we had a little time to kill now. We cleaned the foredeck, which was covered in marsh mud from the anchors, got our screen up, dispatched the remaining greenheads, and settled in for some dinner and cards. But Kozmik Kaos was anchor sailing, swaying back and forth by about 90 degrees, and she was doing it fast. And a curious rushing sound came to us from the creek bend a few yards away. It sounded almost like waves and it looked like there were even tiny whitecaps. Once the darkness came we settled into the main berth for the night. I slept little, once again paranoid about the anchor and too hot, and Cap'n once again slept like a log. A very unmovable unwakeupable log. Eventually I did sleep some and sometime during the night the fierce tide reversed and the boat became less like a pendulum and more like a solid object on a chain.

Day two on the ICW - we make Charleston!

The stand-out memory I have of our second day on the Intracoastal Waterway is definitely our trip through Charleston, SC. Our chartbook for this trip was a rather intimidating affair replete with mysterious lines and symbols of varying types. It had both of us novices a little nervous, to tell the truth, but Charleston really had my knickers in a twist. The chart for Charleston looked like it had been drawn by madmen. We had a nice, tidy pink line to follow on the chart in order to stay in the ICW but in Charleston that sweet little pink line disappeared and was replaced with a maze of other lines that intersected in drunken ways and things that seemed to emanate an urgent and dire warning of submerged objects, restricted areas, and large vessels that wouldn't even notice our tiny little boat was there. Charleston wasn't the quiet and peaceful waters we had navigated the day before. Charleston is a major harbor. It has industry. It has commercial traffic.

As it turned out, I was entirely worried about the wrong thing about Charleston.

I managed to stay relatively calm as Charleston loomed nearer. We found ourselves navigating a nasty, narrow little passage just prior to Charleston that was short but gave us some of the most trouble we had on the entire trip. The currents and the powerboat wakes were making steering a challenge for Brian and then one of the rudders began to emit a loud screech. The Captain commenced with angry yelling as I tried to figure out exactly where the dreaded racket was coming from while he continued to fight the currents. We eventually emerged from the narrow passage and I took over steering while Brian dealt with the rudder. We also had our first restricted opening bridge to contend with before we got to Charleston, the Wappoo Creek, Highway 171 Bridge, which the Cap'n handled like an old pro. He really sounded like he knew what he was doing when he hailed them with our VHF. I was proud. The Wappoo Creek Bridge is an old Bascule bridge at at Statute Mile 471.

We made it through the bridge and soon saw another, much larger, bridge in the distance, the Wappoo Creek, Hwy 171 bridge. This bridge heralded the entrance to Charleston Harbor. Past the bridge we could see a few boats, including a couple of sails! Once we passed under the bridge, and entered the harbor, it didn't take long for it to become apparent that what I really should have been worried about were all the yahoos in their motorboats out to get their weekend boat jollies. Everywhere you turned there were powerboats of all sizes zooming full-throttle across the water. "Rules of the Road" were apparently nothing but a myth here. Many of these boaters, either uncaring of or oblivious to the effects of their wakes on us, blasted past on us on both sides. They passed to our starboard. They passed to our port. They passed in front of us. We were in a state of constant rocking. The sun had decided to come out and was scorching our backs. There was a wide expanse of horizon not far in the distance that I was fairly certain was the Big Blue. The chart was confusing and so were our heretofore sensible ICW markers. Unfortunately, I must compliment the Captain on his prowess during all of this. He got us through there without breaking a sweat (metaphorically anyway, physically is another matter entirely) and kept us right on track with the ICW. Soon the specter of Charleston was behind us and we congratulated ourselves on our successful piloting of Charleston Harbor.

Our passage through Charleston wasn't all bad. It was super cool to see Charleston from the water, including the intricately lovely Cooper River Bridge in the distance.

We needed to stop and refuel not far past Charleston so I consulted my list of marinas, also supplied by the wondermous Salty Southeast Cruiser's Net, and we decided to stop at the Isle of Palms Marina. It wasn't terribly easy to find but they offered a great BoatUS discount and had a restaurant for those of you looking for nibbles in this area. This would be our first time docking since we left Beaufort and, given the horror stories I've read about docking, I was possibly more nervous about this than I was about Charleston. But Brian slid up to the fuel dock like he knew exactly what he was doing and the marina folks helped, so all I had to do was throw the lines to them instead of leaping off and making a complete fool of myself. Success!

Once we refueled it was time to start thinking about anchoring for the night. It was 6:35pm already and we had learned from the previous night's experience that we should anchor early to allow plenty of time for the, shall we say, challenging art of anchoring a boat.

First day on the ICW

Once we arrived in Beaufort we had many tasks to accomplish before we would be ready to embark on our trip up the ICW: finish the paperwork, do an inventory of the boat to see what we had and what we needed, gather supplies and provisions, and get fuel. All of the reading I've done indicates that the majority of cruising actually consists of working on your engine in exotic places, so I shouldn't have been surprised when our departure was delayed by, you guessed it, engine troubles. And, naturally, the trouble turned out to be one small piece of a tank that needed to be replaced. But is that possible? Of course not! No, that would be too easy and inexpensive. What we actually have to do is replace the entire tank. Fortunately for this trip that piece wasn't really necessary. So we decided to make this trip without replacing that bit and Brian turned off the grating buzzing alarm.

We had been further delayed by the scraping of the bottom of the boat. If you aren't a boat owner, or weren't a marine biology major, you've probably never given any thought to the bottom of a boat. If your boat is in the water it very quickly becomes home to a myriad of marine organisms that can produce a huge amount of drag, thereby reducing our already slow speed to a crawl and increasing our fuel consumption. Our boat hadn't been scraped in a few months so that was a job that definitely had to done before we left. The previous owner usually took it out to a sandbar and waited until the tide went out to scrape. Naturally, the low tides that week were going to be in the dark so we decided to take her out to the sandbar mid-tide in the daylight. So we took her out and anchored in about 7' of water. Brian tied one end of a rope to the front of the boat and the other end to the back. The plan was I, being the strongest swimmer, would hang onto the rope and pull myself down its length while going at the bottom of the hulls with a paint scraper.

This sounded like a great idea at the time but multiple forces worked against me: firstly, our lack of a swim ladder. When you're getting on and off the boat in the water it's a lot further down than it looks! I had to get in and out several times and my arms were turning to jelly. We fashioned a foothold with a rope but given my current lack of musculature now it wasn't much help. I was also hindered by the fact that I couldn't get a purchase anywhere. This basically resulted in my hanging onto the rope with one hand, scraping with the other, while my feet flailed around in the air and water like, I was fairly certain, a dying fish. I was cutting my hands and feet on the blasted barnacles which, let me tell you, hurt like the dickens! One of my feet was soon bleeding rather profusely and, I must admit, this didn't help the slight nervousness I already felt about whatever might be swimming underneath me. Frilly, gelatinous things floated into my mouth as I scraped them off. And all of this was further compounded by the fact that there was a fierce current running through there. When I tried to do the inside of the hulls, down the center of the boat, it got really fast and tried to suck me right through. My nerves were shot by then. I finished the front inside of the hulls and then begged Brian to let me up. It was mostly done and that was going to have to be good enough.

After 3 days in Beaufort we were finally ready to go on Friday, August 14th! We rose early the next morning, to catch the outgoing tide, but the sky was a low gray spitting lots of rain. We wouldn't be able to see a thing so we were delayed once again. But the rain cleared up by afternoon and, after a 2 hour shopping trip with Brian in KMart, we were finally able to leave around 3pm.

As we motored away from the dock we were surrounded by dolphins and they continued to be constant companions all the way up to Charleston a couple of days later. I was a mass of nerves and excitement. Binoculars around my neck I dashed from the saloon, where I checked the charts and marked our progress, to the cockpit where I watched for markers, crabpots, and dolphins. Navigating the ICW turned out to be much less scary than I expected. Basically you follow the markers and, unless one is missing, you can pretty much navigate by going from marker to marker. Even the turns we had to make weren't that confusing since we had our chartbook and charts on our Nokia N810. The depths weren't really a problem for us since our catamaran only has a 2 foot draft. However, if I had a monohull I'd be much more nervous about the depths because shallow depths weren't that unusual.

We began the day with gray skies and rain but by afternoon the gray had been washed away by sunshine and we were surrounded by beautiful scenery and wildlife all the way.

Since we had gotten such a late start we didn't get far that day and it was nearly getting dark by the time we decided to anchor. I had a list of anchorages from the Salty Southeast Cruiser's Net (a fantastic resource) and picked one out on a narrow part of the ICW (at Watt's Cut) that showed a small, shallow creek off to the right. And this is where things began to go awry. The creek, shown clear as day on the chart, was nonexistent. It was getting dark. The tide was going out. Crabpots were all around like little bombs waiting to mangle our propellor. And we were running out of time. A combination of factors - lack of anchoring experience, insufficient lighting, physical obstacles, an engine that refused to idle, and changing tides - made our first night anchoring, well, a valuable learning experience would be a positive way to put it. We spent the entire night on anchor watch, being eaten alive by mosquitoes, listening for other vessels (since we finally got anchored nearly smack in the middle of the waterway), and making sure we stayed anchored.

The boat swayed all night long with the currents. When I was on watch I nervously paced the boat with the flashlight, eyeballing the ICW marker, the crabpots, and surrounding marshes to be sure we were actually staying put. At one point, in the wee, wee hours of the morning, I sat huddled under a towel in the cockpit, trying to escape the mosquitoes and the chilling air, watching the horizon slide back and forth and wondering at how I had found myself there. Things splashed in the water around me. I tried to get a glimpse of whatever it was but never could. Brian said he saw them later and they were little fish. Bats flew all around me and I cheered them on, hoping they were devouring some of the billions of mosquitoes that were tormenting us with their buzzing and biting. Then, as I sat pondering the moonlight, the boat suddenly slid much further past the sightline I had been eyeballing. I didn't know what the heck was happening. I called Brian and he came out with me and we watched the boat warily as it settled into a new routine. We had basically swung around by probably 180 degrees for no apparent reason. The anchor was holding though and so we went back to our respective spots to finish out the night.

Brian rose with the sun that morning to work on the engine, which had been a major poophead that night because it refused to run at anything other than full throttle. The Cap'n, being the sometimes genius that he can be, had it working beautifully by the time we left the anchorage that I dubbed a name that shall not be repeated here. After very little sleep we left the anchorage in the pale light of morning, surrounded by lovely seabirds wading in the water having breakfast, as I learned how to percolate coffee on a Coleman propane burner. We motored along, me in a sleepy haze, and I pondered what the second day would bring us. I calculated the day and figured out that we probably would make Charleston that day, which I was rather aflutter with nerves about.

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We have a boat, now where do we put it?

Brian and I have now officially had a boat since early June but it has seemed a little like a dream because we hadn't set foot on it again until mid-August when we moved it from it's long-time home of Beaufort (that's BEWfert, ya'll), SC to Shallotte, NC. The trip from Beaufort to Shallotte, which takes about 3.5 hours by car, took us a leisurely 4 days to make by catamaran and was a trial by fire if ever there was one. There were too many firsts to enumerate here but they included: my first extended period of time on a boat, our first time anchoring a boat, our first time docking a boat, my first time trying to sleep on a boat, my first time living in a 27' oven and bugcatcher, and the first time either of us has seen the Intracoastal Waterway from the water rather than land. Oh! And I can't forget our first time spending a night at a marina, which was nothing short of blissful since it included my first shower in 3 days.

The ICW that I know and love, in North Carolina, is a nice stretch of water that typically runs between the beaches and 'mainland'. It's just a hop over to the ocean. The water is oceany and there is typically a nice ocean breeze. That's North Carolina. In South Carolina, which is where most of our trip was, the designers of the ICW must have been full of hooch when they planned it out because it mostly winds through the buggy, not-so-breezy backwaters of the state, which I've decided should possibly name the mosquito as its state bird. According to ICW history, however, it sounds like this stretch, which was the last part of the ICW to be constructed in its first phase, was even more torturous in the past and it has been improved at various times since its creation in 1913. The ICW actually has an interesting history but I'll leave that for you to discover on your own and will reserve this space for the tales of our trip. I will say that, even though I'm grousing quite a bit about it, there was some lovely and peaceful scenery on this short voyage and the many dolphins and birds and lovely sunsets are what stand out in my mind the most, in spite of the horrifying greenhead that I will tell you about in excruciating detail later.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Get back, self! We started this "vacation" in the bustling metropolis of Shallotte, NC, which truly was a sleepy little town when my grandfather bought land there in the 1970's but has turned into a "real" town that has actual communities, paved roads, traffic and, of course, a Wal-Mart today. When we arrived in Shallotte we planned to go retrieve our boat in a few days but still had no idea WHERE we were going to bring it. A detail that some people might think was pretty important. My new, less-prone-to-anxiety, self didn't have my underwear in a wad though because I knew that things would somehow work out and they surely did. Long story short, we spoke with a super nice lady that was working in her yard one afternoon before leaving for Beaufort and our boat is now docked at her house in Shallotte on the Shallotte River. It's a lovely spot overlooking the marshes and I'd give anything to be sitting in the cockpit with a glass of wine right now.