The bridge was the dividing line. Before we reached the Socastee swing bridge, the ICW was all golf courses and subdivisions; after the bridge, there was nothing but swamp. As the shallow canal (nominally 12 feet, but in one place we passed a dredger repairing a section where Hurricane Floyd had silted in the waterway, and saw only 7 feet as we went by -- scary!) gave way to the naturally deep Waccamaw River, the water took on the familiar coffee color of the cypress swamp.
We anchored just behind our friends on Kindly Light in a tight little riverbend off Bucksport. The night was still and quiet, and the water mirrored the bright moon. After midnight, it rained, and the next morning was chilly, foggy, and windless -- a perfect swamp morning.
The trip down the Waccamaw was eerie. Despite the chill, we kept the vinyl windshield on the dodger rolled up, because the beads of water which kept condensing on it made it even harder to spot the markers which were only barely visible through the fog. A huge amount of debris floated downcurrent, most of it just small bunches of leaves and grasses, but there were a few large logs and tree limbs. In the mist they all looked like alligators. Tributaries forked off into the dense cypress forest in all directions, sometimes looking disconcertingly like the proper path, but we watched the charts and only almost got lost once.
We had a big boost from the current, which for once was with us, and we made Winyah Bay by lunchtime. By this time the fog had dissipated and the landscape had changed completely, from tall cypress to short scrub and finally to open grassland. AfterWinyah Bay, the ICW follows a series of canals which connect a web of rivers leading to the coast. Because the whole area was flat and treeless, the boats out in the rivers appeared to be sailing across the grasslands. As we motored through each river junction, the strong current would grab our bow and shove us around, trying to pull us out of the channel -- fortunately, the places where the rivers crossed the ICW were very deep, scooped out by the tidal action.
The day we traveled the last section of ICW leading to Charleston was the eve of full moon, and the tide was falling. Tides are caused by the moon, and full moons make big tides, both up and down. We could see large mud flats to either side of the narrow channel (men in rubber overalls on them, mucking for clams), and the depthsounder readings were not reassuring. At one point I swung wide to give a tug and barge some room and almost went aground. As we approached the Ben Sawyer swing bridge outside of Charleston harbor, we called the bridgetender for an opening. "I'll open for you when you get here," she said, "and if those three sailboats behind you catch up, I'll let you all through at once."
Well, we had passed two of those boats a while back, and we knew they weren't too fast, but we were used to having to wait to "bunch up" at bridges, so we prepared to hang out for a while. When we arrived at the bridge, though, we rapidly discovered that there wasn't much hang-out room. It was dead low tide, and even mid-channel there was only 11 feet -- I got under 7 feet trying to find something deeper, and quickly turned back, only to find the other side of the channel a lot quicker than I liked.
Just as I was about ready to panic, the bridgetender hailed us on the VHF. "Those other boats are way back there, so I'm going to let y'all through now." I thanked her profusely as she stopped the traffic just for us and opened the bridge. As we motored through, she called us again.
"Windom, has that boat ever seen her home port?"
That "Boulder, CO" on the transom sure does get some comments. "No ma'am," I replied, explaining that we'd bought our boat in Maryland.
"How you gonna get her home?"
"We'll just have to find a way to make it a lot more shallow draft. Like maybe six inches!"
She laughed. "Roger that. Y'all have a nice day and a pleasant holiday weekend."
Somehow we made it into Charleston harbor without running aground, and anchored in the Ashley River outside the city, clearly another popular stop for southbound cruisers.
Before we could do any sightseeing, boat chores beckoned. The windlass had been cranky for the past week, so it had to be disassembled, cleaned, and lubricated. Then we changed the engine oil, which was an epic in itself, as the parts we'd bought to make it easy didn't actually fit onto our engine, so we ended up manually pumping the dirty oil through the dipstick hole into containers (and onto the engine, and the cabin sole, and our blue jeans). We sure don't want to do that again, so we called the Boat US store in Charleston and arranged for them to get the parts we needed Fed-Exed from their warehouse, then delivered to us via the City Marina.
By the way, if you are a boater and reading this, I strongly recommend joining Boat/US. The discount we got at Bald Head Island Marina more than paid for our annual membership, and they lobby Congress on behalf of the boating community.
One thing the boating community could really use is more places to dispose of various regulated substances. Two things in particular we've noted are difficult to dispose of legally: used engine oil, and human waste. It was really nice to discover that the City Marina here in Charleston will take used engine oil for recycling. Too many boaters just leave their used oil containers in dumpsters, not because they don't want to obey the law, but because it's too darn hard to find a place that will take the stuff.
A similar situation exists with human waste. On the waters we've been traveling, there are three legal choices: treatment (this is an electrochemical process, not just a simple additive, and requires installation of special equipment) and then dumping, keeping waste in a holding tank and then dumping it 3 or more miles offshore, and keeping waste in a holding tank and then having it pumped out at a pump-out station. It was easy to get a pump-out in Annapolis -- most marinas had the equipment, and the city even maintains a "pump-out boat" to service anchored and moored boats in the harbor -- and the cost was only $5. But outside Annapolis, we found few pump-outs, and frequently when we did find them we were told, "It's broken," or "The only guy who knows how to use it won't be here until Wednesday." In Coinjock, VA we found out why.
We'd wanted a pump-out and had called a marina on the VHF, verifying they had one and it was operating. What we didn't know until we actually had their equipment hooked up was that they charged by the gallon. At $20 for 60 gallons, it was an expensive pump-out. But it turns out that they aren't hooked up to a municipal sewer, so they have to pay someone else to haul and properly dispose of the waste they get. They set their rates so they break even, but it's a lot for boaters to pay when it's a weekly or biweekly need. Lots of places bought the equipment at subsidized rates from the state government, but can't afford to actually operate them. They don't even want to deal with it, so their pump-outs are permanently "broken". As a result, the laws governing disposal of human waste are frequently also broken.
I know very few boaters who would argue that the law is a bad one (although some rightly point out that the output of the small number of boaters pales in comparison to corporate polluters and farm run-off). But if states are going to require holding tanks and pump-outs, they should require and subsidize pump-out stations, so that people can comply with the law. We have a large holding tank, so we don't mind waiting in order to find a marina with a pump-out service, but we know that many cruisers can't do that and end up dumping illegally. Ok, end of sermon.
We'll be in Charleston through Thanksgiving, and probably through the following weekend. We still have a few chores do do, and we'd sure like to see the city, too. Many cruisers are leaving their boats and flying back to visit family for the holiday. But we'll be celebrating with our new family -- the other cruisers we've met.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there, on sea or on land.