Charleston, South Carolina

We sailed out the ferocious Cape Fear Inlet on a stormy Halloween…well, actually, Halloween was warm and sunny and the inlet was calm as a lake, but that’s not very Halloweeny, is it? We had an uneventful trip to Charleston and arrived on a gorgeous Wednesday morning. The Ashley river anchorage was pretty crowded, but we nuzzled ourselves in at N32 46.614 W79 57.252. We’ve tried a lot, but it doesn’t look like we are going to have a reliable wireless connection here, but maybe it will be enough to send and receive emails when the boat turns the right direction.

As the evening set in, the snowbirds were settling and the anchorage was getting more and more crowded. We recognized some of the sailboats we saw at anchorages in northern NC, but none of our boat show colleagues yet. We are right outside of the Charleston City Marina and could also see some of the larger power yachts who passed us each morning last week tying up to the mega-dock…not all of the snowbirds are on the same budget! The boats in this anchorage don’t lie into the wind; instead, the boats lie with the current. This means that the boat turns 180 degrees about every 6 hours. Once the current turned at 6pm on Wednesday we realized we were a little closer to our New Zealand neighbor than we had originally been when the current was flowing up the Ashley and by 8:30 we were uncomfortably close to him. So we pulled up our 100 feet of chain and found a roomier spot within the anchorage at N32 46.521 W79 57.095. We’ve got lots of turning room here, or I should say we had lots of room until 9am on Thursday when a German couple in an Amel anchored nearby. We took the dinghy over to his boat this afternoon to say hi, and we are going over for drinks this evening.

We are planning on having a couple of quiet days in this lovely historic town and we’re really looking forward to spending some time with Andreas and Nancy this weekend.