Easy morning, anti-swamping

I woke up this morning to birds chattering and squawking (crows) and tooting (the one pictured above) right outside the open hatch. I opened my eyes and saw the belly of a blackbird fly over. Evan came over from the computer, where he was checking the weather conditions for the day, and told me that there would be strong winds today, 20-25 knots (10-15 is fine, 20 iffy, 25 gale-like). We could go out and have an uncomfortable six hours going through marsh stretches of the ICW, which are completely exposed to the wind without any real treeline barriers, hoping that the wind wouldn't blow us, despite our best efforts at the helm, out of the channel and into some shoals.

That's the worst-case scenario, of course. Actually, that's just the tip of the worst-case scenario iceberg. The rest of the worst-case scenario is swamping: one gets grounded in a shoal at high tide, the water level falls as the tide goes out, leaving you stranded like the bird in my picture, the boat's keel gets wedged deeper into the mud bottom at a strange angle, and by the time the tide turns again, the boat is so stuck that it lacks the buoyancy to float back upright with the rising water, which instead floods the boat and causes extensive damage.

Swamping would have been unlikely today, but we're still going to wait out the windy day. The next two days are forecasted to be cold and rainy, and we'd prefer to arrive in Charleston in good weather, hop off the boat, fresh as daisies, and stroll around town all day. So we'll be here in McClellanville for a few days more. Corn muffins, huevos rancheros, lots of reading and writing, full seasons of Weeds and the Wire...I'm pretty happy.

This is home for the next couple of days.

Entering South Carolina

Turkey vulture

Since my last post, Evan and I have traipsed on south out of North Carolina and into South Carolina, a truly charming place with salt marshes, palms, huge live oaks covered in Spanish moss, and, so far, nothing but balmy breezes. There are ospreys and egrets and blue herons, the latter of which are graceful and beautiful until they open their mouths and let out an incredibly loud "RAAAAAWK!!!"

There is also mini-golf in North Myrtle Beach, which hosts the pro mini-golf Masters. Highway 17 is where it's at, and we couldn't help but get sucked into...the Molten Mountain. We were, after all, getting some lettuce at the supermarket just across the street!

http://www.cancunlagoongolf.com/mmhome.html

Surveying the lay of the land

We played a round, which was moderately fun despite the astro-turf funk and occasional retrieval of a golf ball from dry ice-steaming Kool-Aid blue streams. As we left Molten Mountain, the building-volcano erupted in a pyrotechnic blaze. So much flash for a mediocre mini-golf course! Oh well.

Onwards to the Waccamaw River, where the highlight was a joke from the former "male dancer" cab driver who took us from the Wacca Wache Marina to CVS:

"So there's this drunk. He's married but goes out drinking with his buddies every night. One night, he comes home carrying a chicken under his arm. His wife opens the door, and he says, "This is the pig I've been fucking." She looks at him scornfully and says, "You idiot, that's a chicken" to which he replies, "I was talking to the chicken."

Today, we arrived in McClellanville, SC, a tiny southern shrimping town with a population of 516, as of July 2009. This is how we spent the afternoon:

I climbed a great live oak.

Where'd she go?

In the treetop..

I swung on a tire-swing.

We walked around town: trees and houses, two restaurants, and a couple of shops.

Driftwood sculpture and art gallery

The main drag.

Perfect for Halloween

Spanish moss grows on *everything.*

And Evan found another tire-swing.

Tomorrow, we head to Charleston! We'll spend at least 4 days there, soaking in some southern Creole style.