Month: July 2021

Warning:  Folks who love Myrtle Beach maybe should skip this part of the post.

Myrtle Beach was Dirty Myrtle back in the Stone Age when Doug visited for Spring Break.  Then a few years ago Georgetown’s (the university) softball coach booked a team hotel here for a tournament and all the parents got rooms and prepaid and we showed up, checked in, and promptly forfeited the full cost and went to a Marriott because the joint was a dump.  Actually it was a dump that gave dumps a bad name.  There should be a law setting standards for the term “resort.”  At a minimum those standards should require the absence of dirty floors and cockroaches in the rooms and vomit in the elevators.  So mostly we aren’t interested in Myrtle Beach, but the Myrtle Beach Yacht Club had room for us over the holiday weekend.  As previously stressed, however, at least the marina isn’t actually in Myrtle Beach.  More importantly, it’s an awesome place with awesome people.

Before we could get to Myrtle Beach though, we first had to leave Georgetown (the village in South Carolina).   At about 6:45 the tide was going out, giving us a nice current for getting off the dock.  Fire up some Robert Earl Keen on shuffle and we’re off.

Wait a second here.  Now we’re going against that same current, cruising at about six knots.  Six knots seems way slower than 75% of our normal speed.  But what the hell.  Like REK, we got us a ticket to the end of the line.  Wanna feel the air and breathe the countryside.  Even at six knots.

Most of the trip was up the Waccamaw River, which mostly meant cypress swamps and no shallow bits.  Just gorgeous.  Which gave us time to read up on things like the Waccamaw River, which is a part of a huge wildlife habitat.  According to one resource, this is “[c]onsidered one of the finest blackwater rivers in the Southeast.”   Whoa now!  On a boat, black water has a particular meaning, and that meaning is dramatically inconsistent with “clean drinking water, scenic landscapes, diverse fish and wildlife, [and] outstanding recreation.”  In fact, cruising through “black water” is almost as disgusting as staying at a Myrtle Beach “resort.”  But we gambled that maybe there’s room for inconsistent definitions and plowed on enjoying the scenery.  At six knots.

Here’s Emma Todd, oddly docked along the river.

Her new owners are looking for a Captain.  Schooners on the ICW go even slower than six knots, however, so we’re not offering our services.  Plus we don’t know how to sail.

Kudzu.  Yup, we’re in the south.

Although so far we’ve mostly avoided the annoying pests we anticipated, we hit a few swarms as we approached Myrtle Beach.

Three girls with no idea what they were doing came directly at us in fits and starts, literally making us stop to avoid a collision.  The Law of Gross Tonnage apparently was not a part of the rental orientation, and most of these jackasses don’t seem to grasp basic physics.  Thank God we’re not going to be traveling over the next few days when even more insanity is all but certain.

Hey look!  Gypsy Rose’s house still is standing!

We rather assumed that by now the nice people in the nice house with the tastefully painted white dock would’ve accidentally burned it down.

Despite successfully docking hundreds of times, every time we approach a slip in a strange marina, it looks impossibly small.  And the wind kicks up.  And the current increases.  Getting into the Myrtle Beach Yacht Club was no different.  The guy on the radio cheerfully claimed that there was “plenty of room” for our sixteen-foot beam in B21, which is barely over seventeen-and-a-half feet wide.  But we have ten-inch fenders.  Which left only a few inches to spare.  And the wind was kicking up on the beam as we lined up.  And the current felt like it was increasing although we’ll admit it probably wasn’t.  We made it in, but just barely, although as usual after we were in it didn’t look nearly as close.

Someone at Avis should be imprisoned because of the rate we had to pay, but we still rented a car for a few days.  If we’re going to be here, we might as well try to explore a little, run some errands, and find some pickleball.  Check, check, and check.  The pizza in Murrells Inlet was delicious, the Costco had everything we needed, and this morning was an excellent day for pickleball.  Money well-spent on the rental car.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July.  We’ll start the celebration, of course, just like we imagine the patriots of the Revolution did back in 1776.  With pickleball.  Then there’s some hoopla at the marina, which we’ll probably try to watch from the comfort of our back porch.

Invest 97-L indeed became an issue when it turned into Elsa.  Not the Elsa who—after being rescued from her ice castle by a snowman and a reindeer—discovered that true love conquers evil and then gave us the title for this post, of course, but the big storm whose trajectory apparently is impossible for the experts to predict but looks to involve us.

Although our plan is to leave on Tuesday, we’ve agreed with the marina that if things look even a little bad we’ll just stay nice and tied up where we are.  If we’re gonna be stuck somewhere, this marina is about as good a place as possible.

Know who isn’t fazed by storms?

That’s right.  The same numbskull types we saw in Charleston are hanging out here as well.  At least this basin is only about ten feet deep, so the search for bodies shouldn’t be too difficult.

Oh yeah.  Happy Canada Day to our friends from The Great White North as well.  Take off, eh!  It’s a beauty way to go.*

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*During high school—before returning to his country roots—Doug was a huge Rush fan.  Geddy Lee’s greatest musical contribution, however, may have been his collaboration with famous hosers Doug and Bob McKenzie.  Also, RIP Neil Peart.

Although perhaps not quite on par with that time Chloe had her nodes removed, we made the courageous decision to respect the approaching hurricane and not leave our fairly sheltered spot.  So yeah, basically we’re still in Myrtle Beach, although we’re telling people that we’re in Little River despite the fact that the people who live here bizarrely voted down the chance to become a separate town.

The point is, we don’t have much interesting to report.  We did, however, walk down to the lighthouse at the basin entrance.  We didn’t take a picture coming in because we were busy dodging morons on SeaDoos, morons on center consoles, morons on pontoon boats, morons on sailboats, and so on, but here it is.

A few days ago our friend Erin sent us some lighthouse trivia.  We’re not positive but this one probably wasn’t amongst the answers.

We do have a question ourselves though.  In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which are more plentiful?

A.  Jungle-themed miniature golf courses;
B.  Candy shops;
C.  T-shirt megastores (“Buy 1 for $6.99, get 4 free!”); or
D.  Pancake houses.

The answer, of course, is that it’s a trick question.  Nobody has an actual answer, because there are too many of each to count.  But we’re embracing the place anyway.

First of all, the pickleball is awesome.  Our new buddies Pat and Lynn met us Sunday morning and we played until we all were exhausted.  (Admittedly that didn’t take long for one of us.)

The girl who took the picture recently had been traumatized by the shouting and swearing between her dad and her boyfriend—who was just learning the game—so we forgive her for not telling us to face a different direction.  Then on Tuesday, Lynn picked us up, we played more super-fun pickleball, and she took us home.

Second, MBYC is full of interesting folks who have had boats here for years and have lived on those boats for those years.  We’ve enjoyed talking to just about everyone.  We did skip the Fourth of July party at the pool, but it looked like the people who care for that type of thing were having a good time.

Then we slept through the fireworks.  However, the Uber driver who later took Doug to the GPS Store said they were a big dud, so we’re glad we didn’t bother.

When not playing pickleball we mostly puttered around the boat.  Nothing exciting, although we did learn that the reason our chart plotter went blank when we were approaching Georgetown is because the people who sold us the boat hadn’t bothered with much in the way of nautical charts except for the few miles they cruised, all of which were south of Georgetown.  So we feel like uploading all of the US and most of Canada is a useful accomplishment.

One of the many great things about the type of cruising we’ve done is the periodic happy surprise when we run into old friends unexpectedly.  This almost was one of those times.  Because while walking the dock, Dana spotted Mahi Mahi, from St. Clair Shores, Michigan.

Hey we know a Mahi Mahi from St. Claire Shores!  We spent some awesome times with Jerry and Deena.  Late night at Bobby’s Fish Camp.  Anchoring off the Tenn-Tom.  Jerry’s accordion Christmas concert aboard that same Mahi Mahi in Fort Myers Beach.  We kind of lost them after Marathon, but catching up will be awesome.  Not.  Turns out people from St. Clair Shores stay home in the summer and cruise in the winter,  which is both backwards and disappointing.  Still good memories though.

We still haven’t yet watched the meteorology webinar we bought a couple of years ago, but the weird clouds that rolled in on Wednesday sure looked suspicious.

Despite the ominous clouds, we managed to make our way to the Officer’s Club for what could’ve been our Last Supper if Elsa had hit us full force.  Cool place, but not for a Last Supper.

Fortunately she mostly gave us a pass.

The rain and forty-knot gusts were enough to make Dana and Oscar miserable when he needed out, but not enough to sink the boat.  We consider that a victory for the good guys.  The storm now is heading towards several boatloads of friends we have up north of here though, so we’re not done worrying.

Friday the storm was battering places well north of Myrtle Beach and we had exactly zero interest in staying any longer.   So off we went.

In fact, everybody who’s anybody was underway after being stuck in whatever place they chose for shelter.  Loopers lined the ICW as far as Nebo could see.

First up for us was passing two boats that make up what they say is “South Carolina’s only casino.”

It’s a bit odd, though, because The Big M Casino and The Big M Casino II hail from Fort Myers.  We figure they’re up here only because Rick and Mary refused dockage.

Anyway, we made it to Southport.  North Carolina Looper royalty Robert Creech hailed us as we passed C-Life just before we reached Safe Harbor.  We once spent a great evening on his front porch swapping Loop stories.  He and his huge bunch docked for lunch a bit later, but we were too busy trying to coax power out of the new pedestals to chat much.

The helpful dock guys put us outside, which was great because that way we could enjoy tremendous wakes from all the boats driven by people who were way late for very important appointments so couldn’t afford to slow down.

All things being equal, we try not to travel on Saturdays because Saturdays typically are when people who shouldn’t go boating go boating.   We’d rather have their wake hit us than their boat hit us.  But it’s okay, because that means on Saturdays we get to do other stuff that’s even more fun.  Like scooter around pretty Southport neighborhoods.

This Saturday, we also got word that the Italian place has great food but doesn’t take reservations.  Doug walked up a half-hour before they opened to check it out.  Good thing, because the line was absurd.

The food indeed was excellent, although there’s a good argument that neither of us needed pie.

After the unnecessary pie, how about a couple episodes of Suits?  Pops got us hooked on the series, which is quite entertaining but without a doubt the most preposterous show about attorneys ever contrived.  Even though they’re just actors pretending to be lawyers, after every show we almost feel obligated to report all of them for gross ethical violations.  (Not Rachel though, in part because she’s a paralegal and in part because for now at least she’s British royalty and may have some sort of immunity.)

This morning we awoke to a fifteen-knot wind pinning us to the dock.  With Coconuts still about ten feet behind us.  A cool maneuver with a dockhand holding a bow line while we swung the stern out into the wind and the current, however, did the trick nicely, although sadly it’s not memorialized in photos.

Smooth cruising up to Wrightsville Beach, past stuff we noted in the blog last time but aren’t recycling here.  Instead, here are range lights on the Cape Fear River, marking the entrance to Snow’s Cut.

Back in the day—before an odd little Intel employee named Ted Hoff invented the microprocessors which ultimately begat electronic chartplotters—range lights undoubtedly were quite useful.  You line them up visually for the safe direction of travel.  Now they’re like those old pop-out cigarette lighters in cars.  Unusual, useful to a very small set of people, and something very few people will notice missing when they’re gone.

Just past Snow’s Cut, rain started coming in through the screen and landing, among other places, on Oscar’s head.  He didn’t seem bothered.

Tonight we’re in Wrightsville Beach, home of the Carolina Yacht Club, which dates to 1887 and claims to be the oldest yacht club in the United States.  Maybe we’d have stayed there just to say we did, but we once docked for a few days at the oldest yacht club in ALL OF THE AMERICAS.  The Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron predated Wrightsville Beach’s club by about fifty years.  So we’re staying at Seapath.

Although the Heat Index today was just a few degrees short of boiling water, we took off for a four-mile hike around the beach.  It’s a pretty nice beach, and a bunch of people were out enjoying it.

We’d been told not to expect much from Wrightsville Beach, but frankly we’re wishing we could stay an extra day or two.

Hey, here’s an unexpected little something for us to file away for use on a metaphorical rainy day.  Mallory and Shannon have become good enough friends with the Andy Eriks family to get invited to the Change of Command Ceremony AND the after-party last Friday.

Captain Eriks is leaving his Hawaii post to take over as Chief of Coast Guard Aviation Forces.  So that makes him a big deal, and—although he has absolutely no idea who we are—we’re not above fraudulent name-dropping if we ever need to light a fire under a recalcitrant Coastie.  After all, what’s the point of even having kids if you can’t take advantage of their friends’ parents?

So the Figure Eight Bridge is five miles past the Wrightsville Beach Bridge.  They both open on the hour and half hour.  We go eight knots.  Without a strong push, that’s not helpful math for the good guys.

Fortunately, the Seapath Dockmaster said Wrightsville would open on request if we got there by 6:45.  So an early Monday departure was the plan.  The center console that came in overnight was still there at 6, however, ten feet in front of us and blocking our easy exit.

The guy who parked there might’ve been surprised to find it thirty feet further up the dock, but we took advantage of the space we created and shoved off into the wind on schedule.  Gorgeous morning.

Wrightsville Beach Bridge opened with perfect timing.  We idled up to Figure Eight and only waited a few minutes for the 7:30 opening.  Nice.

Mondays are far superior to weekends for traveling, and this one was a beaut.  Light breeze.  Periodic cloud cover.  Boating morons back in their holes.  George Strait Radio on Pandora.  Extra nice, because we had a long-ish day up to Swansboro.

Well, almost all the morons were gone.

Back through Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.  No live shelling or Mechanized Landing Craft this time, but Ospreys buzzed us again while we waited for the Onslow Beach Bridge to open.

And the shore still looked like a good place to train for war if we ever send troops back to Southeast Asia rice paddies.

We’ve certainly enjoyed the big cities along the way, but some of the quirky towns have been extra special.  Places like Havre de Grace, Clayton, Everglades City, Lunenberg, and Killarney, to name a few.  Places we’d never heard of and would never seek out but were damn glad we found.  Swansboro, North Carolina, is that kind of town.

First of all,  Tumbleweed was the only boat at the small marina, which meant peace and quiet and nobody to judge Oscar harshly for peeing on the dock when he can’t make it to the grass.

Then we found a cool little artsy pond with geese between the boat and a delicious late lunch, which is what you can get—even on a seven-hour travel day—if you leave at 6:30.

The town is tiny, but compensates with several good places to eat, friendly people, and those little shops that sell embroidered pillows and lavender candles and driftwood “Welcome to our beach” signs, but never seem to have any male customers.

Swansboro even had wildlife for Dana to sneak up on.

Oh, and a summer concert series in the town park—in this case Swanfest—that we always miss by exactly one day.  People who visited yesterday got to enjoy the “retro rock” performance by Hank Barbee and the Dust Parade.

Swansboro is famous for its Mullet Festival, held annually since 1954.  The rumor—which we’re starting right now—is that Billy Ray Cyrus once showed up but was disappointed to learn that a fish was the center of attention.  The point, quite obviously, is that we found Swansboro to be a very worthy stop.

Alas, we’re humping it up the coast to compensate for our extended stays in South Carolina.  So we scootered around town, had a nice breakfast, and watched the picnic table fly out of the city worker’s truck into the middle of the busy highway he was trying to cross.  Then we left.

Shortly after pulling out, we happened upon the aftermath of a conversation that quite likely ended with “Oh shit we’re grounded,” immediately preceded by something along the lines of “Honey, please be quiet.  I know what I’m doing.  There’s plenty of water in here.”

If those kids are like our kids, dad will be reliving this ignominious moment for quite some time.

A few minutes later Dana captured another moment involving a sand bar, this one less angry and more artsy.  If anyone knows this woman, please tell her we’ll be happy to sell her a print.

Beaufort—yesterday’s destination—is just across the channel from Morehead City, which inexplicably has a large commercial port.  The bulk cargo carrier Nordseine had just pulled in after a ten-day trip up from Brazil.  We figure it must be taking back a load of pine straw since that’s what seems most plentiful around here.

Anyway, we made it back to Homer Smith’s Docks.  Last time through Beaufort our post discussed Blackbeard and Queen Anne’s Revenge, the pirate ship he scuttled just outside the inlet.  What we didn’t hit before, however, is Hammock House, where the great pirate lived and undoubtedly planned many of his infamous exploits.  That’s a big miss for a town where we stayed a few days, so better check it out this go round.

How cool is it that Blackbeard’s house—built in 1709–is still standing?  Hey wait, what’s this little sign?  Actually it’s probably the most historically ambiguous sign we’ve seen.

So really this is just an old house that some unknown person with unknown motives and unknown sources of information once said that maybe it had something to do with the town’s most famous citizen?  The only thing that even sounds factual is that it’s the oldest house in Beaufort.  Grrrrr.

Since Beaufort basically was a pit stop, we mostly did administrative chores on the boat.  Leaving Homer Smith’s Docks like we did this morning is easy.  Unlike arriving from the south.  We’ve heard that coming in can be tricky if you correctly keep the red marker to starboard but it’s actually marking a different channel and then the Dockmaster screams into the radio “Stop!  Don’t come any further!  Reverse and go back to the bridge.”  We’re Gold Loopers, of course, so that would never happen to us.  Plus when we stopped to turn around there was at least six inches under the keel.

Before we left, Doug started worrying that someone would think to himself or herself “While I wait all day at the courthouse to see if I get picked for a jury, I’d really like to watch an eight-minute Time Warp video of an entire four-hour trip through the North Carolina hinterlands from Beaufort to River Dunes.”  Just in case, we set up the new Go Pro for the first time.

Not much to report from along the way.  We did safely pass Gum Thicket Shoal, however, which is one of the cooler names of shoals we’ve safely passed.

River Dunes without a doubt has the most picturesque approach of any place we’ve been.

We analyzed this place in the blog at some length last time through, and from the looks of things exactly nothing has changed.  It’s still pristine to the point of looking fake.

We’re not taking any days off until we get to the Albemarle Sound, so all we really have to offer is the video.  The anticipated Time Warp fell victim to Doug’s ineptitude, of course, so basically we got a full four hours of normal speed video, the watching of which might be worse than jury duty.  In case someone needs to kill just eighty-nine seconds, however, we sped up the beginning and end and cut out the middle.

Before leaving River Dunes on Thursday morning, we chatted up the nice folks aboard Mad Hatteras, a cleverly named motor yacht docked stern to stern with us.

Cool story.  The dude on the right—who lives in New Bern—bought the boat in a New York criminal restitution sale when the couple who owned her went to prison for ripping off their friends and family in a hospital-bed invention scam.**  The Hatteras shipyard also is in New Bern, and last year all the pandemic-furloughed workers were anxious for work, which worked out great for the new owner.  So some good did come of fraud and Covid, at least for one guy.

Another easy peasy day.  The Pamlico Sound was so smooth and windless we could’ve crossed it in one of those floating tiki bars on which we’ve previously commented.

Right on up into Dowry Creek, where our old buddy Jeff met us at the fuel dock.  Jeff not only is the Dockmaster, he also served as our bartender at a joint where we ate two years ago, and will be the restaurant manager next time we come through.  So basically he’s the Oscar of Belhaven.  Not Oscar the incredibly handsome senior dog, of course, but Oscar from The Proposal, whose performance by definition was Oscar-worthy and served as a springboard for his current gig as a fake State Farm agent.  Anyway, we do love this little family-run marina.

The diesel fuel with ValvTect was a great price.  An available pool and court for swimmers and tennisers.  The courtesy car not only had the obligatory check-engine warning, but also a tire warning, and a bottle of power steering fluid in the cup holder, just in case.

There’s not much to Belhaven, although we certainly enjoyed the Spoon River place noted below, which the courtesy car surprisingly reached with no difficulty.

We saw nothing in town that matched up to the mural for excitement, but the mural was pleasing anyway.

Since all of these stops are one-nighters, we took off Friday morning up the Pungo River.

The point of the photo is just that it’s the Pungo River, which gives us another chance to work in the word Pungo.  Pungo is a pleasingly odd word, particularly when said out loud.

A few miles before turning off the Pungo River and into the Pungo River-Alligator River Canal, we spotted a tow boat pushing a loaded barge ahead, close enough to catch, but not close enough to catch before the canal.  Just great.  The canal is thirty miles long, and we know from experience that passing a huge barge at a one-knot speed differential sucks, even when there’s plenty of room to avoid most of the wake.  So now we’ll be stuck going extra slow for five hours.  The anticipatory curse words that echoed around the pilothouse proved unnecessary, however, because Royal Engineer cheerfully agreed to slow down and let us around moments before the shores closed in.  Dang, that was nice of him.

Weirdly enough, thirty miles of canal can be boring and interesting at the same time.

The boring part at least allowed some poking around on Navionics and Google, however, before we lost cell service for a couple of hours.  Dana found Phelps Lake just to the north.

By itself Phelps Lake on a navigation chart isn’t very interesting.  But what the hell is a single red channel marker doing in a round lake, and why is it number 34?

A bit later, a pontoon boat named Blue Horizon zipped around us.  With a Loop burgee flapping off the bow.

Turns out the dude in fact is doing the Loop.  Solo.  In a pontoon boat.  Which basically makes Charlie a sissy, but that’s neither here nor there.  And he’s jamming, because he left Vero Beach a week ago.  In our short radio conversation, we didn’t share our presumptuous opinion that the Loop is for seeing new things and meeting new people, not speeding through.  We also are of the opinion that it’s too hot and humid to sleep outside on a pontoon boat every night, so it probably was for the best that we just wished him well.

Navionics helpfully warned that the canal sides “are foul with debris, snags, submerged stumps, and continuous bank erosion.”

Hey, no problem.  We’ll just stay right in the middle.  Actually one problem, and the problem answers to the name Island Lookout.  And it’s coming at us.  And it’s using up the middle.

No worries though, because if that sailboat has room, we’ll have room too, right?  Ok, a second problem.  The sailboat is Rock N Chair, and we heard him ask the tow captain for a big wake, with the hope that a big wake would rock him and his chair off the stump that had him trapped.  Which mostly confirmed Navionics’ warning about stumps and such, and left us wondering whether we’d need to name-drop to get the Coast Guard guys to pull us off the nose of a barge.

Somehow it all worked out.  Island Lookout left us just enough room and generated almost no wake to toss us around—or to help the stranded boat.  We were happy to crank up an extra few hundred rpms to make the wake that Rock N Chair requested of us, which freed her from the canal’s stumpy clutches.  We again demonstrated maturity by not offering our opinions.

A storm chased us almost all the way up to Alligator River Marina, and although the rain never caught us, we didn’t beat the rolling beam waves that made the last bit a touch unpleasant but which we counter-balanced with the pleasantness that came from turning on the generator and air conditioning.

As confirmed by drone, things were much smoother in the Alligator River Marina/truck stop basin.

Shortly after we tied up, an American Tug named Cenyth pulled in behind us.   We enjoyed chatting with Loopers David and Karen, although the otherwise happy conversation turned to a darker place after they reminded us about the AC-killing jellyfish in the Chesapeake.

The big concerns crossing the Albemarle Sound today were more wind and more beam waves.  But there’s nothing to do at the truck stop, so we took off for Albemarle Plantation, with collecting packages and a few days of relaxation in our immediate future.

Euclid may have concluded that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but we’re guessing the Greeks in his time didn’t lay out nearly as many crab traps as we encountered.  Although the winds were unexpectedly benign and the seas were just slightly lumpy, zero chance of anything close to a straight line across the sound.  We’re officially breaking our promise—hastily made in the midst of a zillion lobster floats in Maine—to never complain again about crab pots.

Things brightened considerably when we tied up and found a golf cart waiting on the dock for us.

Contrary to the modern view of the word “plantation,” this one has no unsavory history.  It’s a master-planned community that first broke ground in about 1990, although the master who planned it lacked the foresight to install pickleball courts and the current residents apparently haven’t yet risen in revolt.  Over the next few days we’ll still have great fun with the golf cart, however, at least during the moments when we aren’t either dithering about whether to take the Dismal Swamp route up to Norfolk or anticipating jellyfish in our strainers.

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*Yes, we had a delicious dinner at Spoon River Artworks and Market, which is why the song in Edgar Lee Master’s masterpiece surfaced from the lint trap of Doug’s dusty memory bank.  We ain’t never seen a mustache on a cabbage head either.

**The couple are Dave and Mona Wright, who—in addition to being convicted felons—presumably are big Elton John fans.