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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