This section was supposed to be the shortest, time wise. Our plan was to leave Charleston on the outgoing tide and make the overnight crossing in the ocean to Fernandina Beach. Leaving in the morning, we’d arrive in Florida by the next afternoon. The forecast, which sounded favorable to us, called for 10-15 kt NE winds, shifting to the east with 2-4 foot waves. And so as the tide fell, we motored into a northeast wind, past Ft. Sumter and out into the Atlantic. And into trouble.
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| Motoring out past Ft. Sumter |
It was not really trouble, as far as Luna was concerned. The passing cold front had left the seas confused and very choppy and larger than advertised (of course). The wind blew in a quadrant from north to east northeast. And, as the coast fell off to the west, our course took us nearly directly downwind.
This combination made for an uncomfortable day. The disordered waves tended to turn Luna to the west, gybing the jib and making her roll. The first mate was sickened by the motion. Steering required constant vigilance. And while I manned the helm, the commander looked at the electronic chart for inlets we could safely enter if we changed our plan.
We sailed on for a while. The mate got more accustomed to the Luna’s motion and, with assurances that the conditions were OK for Luna, less fearful. We took down the jib and motor-sailed with reefed main and preventer. This combination steadied us somewhat. As we looked ahead, however, we couldn’t imagine keeping this up all night in the dark, when we would be unable to see the sail and waves. Moreover, we wouldn’t be able to use the autopilot, which would have been overwhelmed by all the turbulence.
To the west was St. Helena’s Sound, an inlet with a deep, buoyed channel, but with reports of sandy shoaling with the recent storms. On the charts, we saw an anchorage in a quiet creek within the shore. We decided to make for the inlet.
Our course had taken us far enough out to sea that it took a couple of hours to reach the inlet, and by then the sun was going down. Under a spectacular sunset and a crescent moon, we followed the buoys as long as we could see them. Then, as darkness fell, we relied on our electronic charts and depth-finder to stay in the deeper water and had no trouble with shoals. We all were relieved when we reached the shelter of the shore and the calm water of Jenkin’s Creek, where we anchored for the night.
Back on the Waterway, we read the daily weather report only to find that more heavy weather, a tropical storm heading inland from the Gulf of Mexico, was to reach us in two days. So we made a short course to the friendly marina at Port Royal, just below Beaufort (that’s Beeyoufort), SC, for two nights. They lent us their courtesy car, and we explored the little town in the rainy afternoon.
Beaufort, and the area around it, has a fascinating history. Predating Jamestown, it was one of the earliest colonial settlements. Spanish, French, and English explorers left their marks here. Under Spanish control, it became the capital of Florida until, facing pressure from the English, the Spaniards moved the capital to St. Augustine.
At the time of the American Revolution, the population of Beaufort was 9,000, which included 8,000 slaves. The area prospered growing rice and indigo in the marshlands, and logging the live oak trees for ship-building.
After the Revolution, the Tories relocated to the Bahamas with their slaves, but sent cotton seeds back to their former neighbors. This crop, highly prized Sea Island cotton, replaced rice as a staple of the economy.
After the attack on Ft. Sumter, the Union army occupied Hilton Head Island, and the interesting part of the local history began. Under Union control, all slaves were freed, and escaped slaves found safe harbor here. The Federal government made efforts at education and economic development. Former slaves became their own masters on the sea islands in what is now Beaufort County, and, under Reconstruction, the area had a majority black population. The Gullah culture, a Creole mixture of American and African influences and language, is celebrated in local museums.
The economy grew with shellfish-packing plants, lumbering, and a phosphate-mining operation. Then came the end of Reconstruction. The party of Lincoln gave way to the party of Jim Crow, a hurricane decimated the local economy, and a fire destroyed the phosphate plant. As many blacks joined the great migration to find work in northern states, Beaufort became an area dominated by whites once again.
With this transition came the collapse of the shellfish industry as pollution took away the once prized Daufuskie Island oysters. The local economy was rescued when the Marines established a training base and an air station on Parris Island. This wartime boost continued through the Korean and Viet Nam wars and prevails today.
Now the area prospers from vacation homeowners as well. Traveling past Beaufort around Hilton Head and Daufuskie Island, we gape at the large homes and boats. One of the historic plaques at the Beaufort waterfront notes that the surrounding county has the second highest per capita income of any in South Carolina. However, where there are no houses, the salt marshes with their tall grass and hidden creeks winding in from the river mark a desolate and beautiful section of the Waterway, and I am glad we were forced to make this detour.
If, seeing the local fishermen in their small boats coursing through the seemingly featureless salt marshes and tidal creeks, one thinks of Luke Wingo, the Prince of Tides, it is because this is the country of Pat Conroy. He graduated from Beaufort High School, and after college, he returned to the area to teach and write until his death last year. The Water is Wide, his book based on his experiences teaching on Daufuskie Island exposed the institutional racism of the Jim Crow era and celebrated the enduring power of education guided by a committed and loving teacher. His tenure, however, lasted but a year, after which he was fired for his unconventional methods and refusal to resort to corporal punishment in his classroom. There is a Pat Conroy literary festival going on, but we arrive a few hours too late to catch stage productions of The Color Purple and Conrack (the Daufuskie Island students’ name for Mr. Conroy).
We’ve learned that Beaufort was the first to build an integrated high school in the early 1970’s and prides itself on having left the legacy of the old South behind. It’s a richly complicated area that moved from slavery to control by the black Gullah culture, back to white dominance, to prosperity in the wartime economy, to the end of the “separate but equal” schools, to a mecca for second homeowners. And, after it all, one may wonder how these princes and princesses of tides voted in the last presidential election. It turns out the county favored the Republican alternative by 55-41 percent, exactly the same split as the state of South Carolina as a whole.
The marina was generous with its courtesy car, but within easy walking distance were several of the shopping staples for the nautical cruiser. We visited the Mexican restaurant, and the next day, I walked to Advance Auto to dump some used motor oil. A little further was the supermarket for a few things, and I passed West Marine. Passing West Marine always produces some anxiety: the thing you don’t buy is the very next thing that will break as you sail away. I was able to control myself, and on the way back, found a little stand selling fresh seafood where I bought a couple of red snapper filets and a pound of fresh crabmeat.
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| Luna tied to the face dock at Port Royal |
We stayed the second day and waited for the storm to pass. We were fine with the rain and thunder, but the wind created huge waves on the river that flowed right by the face dock where we were tied. So we spent a miserable couple of hours banging against our fenders that protected us from the dock. But this too passed, the sun came out, and we had a lovely dinner of fresh snapper, wrapped in parchment with a little Caribbean seasoning, lemon slices, and butter, and baked in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes. To celebrate the passing of the storm and the end of the pounding, we brought out a bottle of nice red wine we had been carrying.
The marina offered three nights for the price of two, but with the storm past us, we left the next morning, riding the tide through the bottom of South Carolina into Georgia. We passed the Savannah River and made a few more miles before stopping at the marina on Isle of Hope. Here we tied up under much calmer circumstances to the face dock between the megayacht and the 50-foot sailboat.
The sailor came over to greet us. He told us he had been sailing north from Fernandina Beach to Norfolk, but the wind and waves were so great that he and his wife couldn’t stand the pounding and came into shore. We felt vindicated for having changed our course a few days earlier.
The Commander and I walked around the streets on the Isle of Hope. It’s a lovely place. Small houses with lots of people out and about in the late afternoon—people walking dogs, kids on bikes, adults with kids. This is such a different feeling from the large homes along the Waterway further north where we rarely saw any people outside. As we walked, we marveled at the huge live oaks draped with Spanish moss, aged survivors of the wooden ship-building days that shaded the houses, streets, and yards.
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| Spanish moss drapes the ancient Live Oaks |
But the wind allowed us to put out the genoa, and we motor-sailed through the crooked creeks and rivers, around the marshes, and through the sounds of the Georgia sea islands. I remembered times flying north from Florida, when I had a window seat and could look down and see a twisted mess of water and land. And this is what we were sailing through. The rivers were deep. We sailed three miles to make two as the crow flies. The views were spectacular. We were mostly alone in a fantastic remote world of water and grass, and occasionally the wider rivers were joined to the sky by a thin horizon of green marsh grass.
At one point, the Commander looked back and saw a buoy following us. Apparently we had run over something, most likely a crab trap. She turned, and I was able to grab the rope with our boat hook. It led to a styrofoam box, and on the other end, trapped by Luna’s keel, was a plastic parachute and the remnants of a rubber balloon. Directions and a mailing envelope fastened to the box told us how to send the weather sonde back to NOAA. Perhaps they flew this during the recent hurricanes.
We penetrated further into this lonely world. And the thought crossed my mind, “If something were to happen with Luna, it would probably be here, far from civilization.”
We motor-sailed on, and at one point, on a starboard tack, we heeled slightly to port. Heeling to port offers the opportunity to pump Luna’s bilge, which is very shallow because of her swing keel. The pump is on the port side, and when she heels that way, all the water goes there, and the pump can do its job. I turned on the pump, and reflexively, opened the hatch to look at the bilge.
Luna rarely collects much water down there, and imagine my surprise to find it full of water up to the cabin floor. Somehow, water is getting into the boat.
The role of the captain in these situations is to remain calm, assess the problem, and devise plans and contingencies to solve it. It can be a bit like a chess game to think two or three moves ahead with real consequences. I closed the hatch and came up to the cockpit, where I announced, “There is a problem with water getting into the bilge. Don’t worry, everything is fine.”
“That’s good,” said the Commander at the wheel. “But how come you’re wearing your life jacket and climbing out onto the swim ladder?”
That didn’t actually happen. I came up and said, “Water is getting into the bilge from somewhere. I’ve turned on the pump, but I have to climb down into the cockpit locker to have a look.” When the mate and I got all the stuff out of the locker and opened the hatch to the back of the engine, I expected to see a loose through-hull fitting or maybe a burst cooling hose. What I found was a pinhole in the heat exchanger and a spray of seawater soaking the area under the cockpit and draining into the bilge.
Luckily, we have an alternative means of propulsion, so at the expense of a little speed, we could turn off the engine. While the Commander sailed Luna through the Waterway, I thought of ways to fix the hole, or to reroute the cooling hoses to bypass the heat exchanger and run sea water directly through the engine. I discounted the idea of duct tape, useful in fixing nearly anything else. However, we did have a tube of quick setting epoxy among Luna’s tools. So I cleaned the area with lacquer thinner to remove any grease, mixed up some epoxy, and coated the area, trying to work the stuff into the small hole. We continued to sail for a few hours to give the glue plenty of time to cure.
We came out on Sapelo Sound, the wind in our face, and the tide running against us. We tried to tack upwind and up current, but it seemed we lost ground with each tack. The only way forward was to start the motor. If the patch failed, we’d just have to keep the bilge pump going. We held our breath, and I turned the key. We started against the tide. I looked down into the motor—no water. The fix held, and remains in place today, four days later. Hopefully it will hold until we get to Stuart, and I’ll replace the heat exchanger there. It must be corroded from the inside.
Meanwhile, we found another lovely secluded anchorage in the marshy low country, this time on the Crescent River. The next day, running at high tide, we passed the shoals at Jekyll Island to anchor off the northern end of Little Cumberland Island at Terrapin Cove in St. Andrew’s Sound. Here, the waterway is wide open, and at night we can see the lights of Brunswick to the north and the glow from Fernandina Beach in the south. And, aside from a few flashing buoys and the deserted beach that wraps around to the east and south, there is not much else. There is a watery world before us, and we have it all to ourselves. At least above the surface.
From there it’s a short hop (20 miles) to Fernandina Beach, so there is no rush to leave next morning. The Commander sleeps late and makes pancakes for us when she rises. The sun is warm. We have a brief swim and bathe in the salty water, rinsing off with the fresh water in the sun shower. Finally, we’re back on the magenta line, motor-sailing with the east wind to Fernandina Beach, where we pick up a mooring at the Municipal Marina. Florida at last!
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| Sunrise in Fernandina |
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