This is the way parties happen, I guess. We had mentioned to Paul and Lise from Effie that it would be nice to get together with a few other cruisers for a Thanksgiving dinner. The next day I was over on Effie, and some other cruisers dinghied up; Paul introduced me as "Ilana, who's organizing a cruisers' Thanksgiving dinner." Who, me? Oh, I guess I'd better do it then.
It worked out pretty well. The Charleston Yacht Club kindly consented to us using their patio. I made announcements on the radio and doled out cooking assignments. It rained off and on all morning, then cleared up and the sun came out the exact moment the party started. We ended up with about twenty people, and a real feast. Two boats provided small turkeys, one made stuffing and mashed potatoes, one brought sweet potatoes, and one brought the cranberry sauce, so we had a perfectly traditional dinner, with walnut pie (which Windom provided -- I didn't have any pecans!) for dessert. Potluck Thanksgiving's the only way to go when nobody has an oven much bigger than a toaster!
After several days of boat chores and bad weather, we finally made it into Charleston to actually see the place. The city is on a peninsula formed by the Ashley and the Cooper rivers (both rivers are named after the same man: Ashley Cooper!) This gives Charleston a lot of waterfront, and it's lined with parks and beautiful mansions, the sort that bring to mind the gracious southern plantation house, although these are all close together, separated only by tiny gardens.
It's actually surprising that there are so many nice old buildings here, because Charleston has gotten hammered by just about every possible natural and unnatural disaster. Hurricanes in the late 17th, early 18th, and late 20th (Hugo) centuries; shelling during the Revolutionary War, when the city fell to the British, and during the Civil War; and a major earthquake and citywide fires in the late 19th century.
We took a tour boat ride to visit Fort Sumter, which is on an artificial island in the harbor. It would have been nicer if we could have dinghied over, because the tour boats only allow a little more than an hour at the fort and we could have spent twice that, but the conditions were a little rough for the 5-mile crossing. The first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, which was the last fort here in Federal hands before the Confederates took it.
We also visited the USS Yorktown, the WWII aircraft carrier which after decommissioning was towed to Charleston and turned into a museum. A destroyer, a Coast Guard cutter, and a submarine are also part of the museum. One of the highlights of the Yorktown was a documentary, "The Fighting Lady", which was filmed aboard in 1944 and won an Academy Award. It's heavy on patriotism and on "shooting down those dirty Japs", very much a product of its time. The Coast Guard ship Ingham was also very interesting because of its long service record; it was deployed in WWII and in the Vietnam and Korean wars, then was used in drug interdiction and in interception of Cuban refugees, and was decommissioned only ten years ago.
On
our way back to the boat we passed through the downtown market, a
sort of perpetual craft show. The most interesting thing there were
the sweetgrass baskets, woven by black women with techniques handed
down from their slave forebears. They were very beautiful, and quite
expensive, since the process is time-consuming. I would not have
minded one as a souvenir of Charleston, but we've had problems with
wicker baskets growing mold in the damp boat environment, so I
decided not to risk it.
Charleston doesn't really have a harbor. Most boats anchor in the Ashley River, on one or the other side of the channel. That's where we are, on the far side of the channel, directly across from the City Marina. The big problem with anchoring in the Ashley River is that it's, well, a river. The current switches from upstream to downstream with the tide, and on ebb tide it really rips through; we've seen our knotmeter read 1.9 knots while at anchor. If you fell in on an ebb tide, you'd just get swept out to sea.
All these current switches make boats swing around a lot at anchor, especially when the wind pipes up. The anchorage isn't very protected, and when the wind blows across the current the boats get all confused, with the current pushing them one way and the wind another. It's also fairly deep, so a lot of anchor rode is needed, which translates into big swinging radii. Several boats have dragged while we've been here.
The day before Thanksgiving, a young guy singlehanding a 36-or-so foot Beneteau anchored nearby, although still a reasonable distance away. The next morning at max ebb current, the wind was blowing pretty strongly. We were working on installing our new GPS, and Britt went out into the cockpit to pull some wires. As soon as he got outside, he yelled a deleted expletive, and I heard him running across the deck. I immediately popped my head out to see us about to T-bone the Beneteau.
A quick check at the positions of the surrounding boats showed that we were still in our spot. The other boat's anchor line pulled at an odd angle, and it was sideways to the current, a sure sign that it was dragging. The boat's owner roared up in his dinghy; he'd just started to head to shore, looked back, and saw his boat taking off without him. Britt was trying to keep the boats apart, but we did dent the other guy's rail a bit.
The owner of the other boat clearly had his hands full. He quickly accepted my offer to come over and drive while he tried to deal with his anchor, so I dinghied over and grabbed the Beneteau's wheel. The anchor line seemed to have wrapped around the boat's keel (it had a skinny fin keel). I tried to rotate the boat around the line, but the current was too powerful to fight. When the owner tried to pull up the anchor and I powered forward, the line snapped. (Britt thought it had probably wrapped around the boat's prop.) I drove to another spot (not so close to us!) while the owner dug out his second anchor and prepared to re-anchor.
I felt really bad about the guy losing his anchor, but I'm not sure what we could have done to avoid it. We had considered trying to push the stern of his boat around with our dinghy, but didn't think it would work because the current was probably too strong to overcome. In our opinions, this situation was the fault of his anchor rode, which was almost all line with only a few feet of chain. Chain would have perhaps been held further down by its own weight and not so likely to wrap around the keel. Like most cruisers, our primary anchor rode is all chain. The fin keel of the Beneteau also seems more likely to get wrapped than a full keel or modified fin (what we have). Anchoring with two anchors in the Bahamian style (one forward and one aft, both off the bow) would have helped prevent this situation, but generally you anchor the way you see everyone else anchoring (because a boat on a Bahamian style moor has a different swinging radius than a boat on a single anchor, and unless you have a lot of room you want to swing in concert with everyone else) and nobody in the anchorage was on two anchors (we weren't either).
We can't be too smugly self-righteous, though, because we have anchor problems of our own. We use a float to mark our anchor (an empty Tide jug on a length of line) and after a few current shifts, we noticed that we weren't rotating around our anchor as we expected. It looks like our chain has wrapped around some submerged object, and that's what's anchoring our boat. We're hoping that when we pull in the chain to leave, it will unwrap itself. We can also use the anchor float as a trip line to retrieve the anchor. It might be easier then to free the chain without the anchor holding down the other end. We hope we won't have to cut our chain to get away.
[Postscript: a few days later, the wind and current were acting up again and a lot of boats had problems again. We saw the same Beneteau right up against another boat. We had anchored it pretty far from that boat, so the anchor must have dragged -- not unlikely because his second anchor was not a good type for a reversing current (it was a Bruce, which won't swivel and stay set). The next day the Beneteau was at a mooring...and the owner is probably about ready to swear off anchoring in a current.]