I am writing this in Rutland, VT fresh on the heels of a wonderful, no rain graduation morning. With one ear and eye I am monitoring the local NBC station to see what’s happening with the Preakness Stakes (go California Chrome!), which thanks to our dinner reservations, I will miss seeing live. This post will probably not get finished tonight either.

In an effort to get caught up, this post will be light on words and heavy on photos.

We bid farewell to St John’s Yacht Harbor and caught our third and final Wappoo Creek Bridge opening as we headed into Charleston harbor and closed in on Fort Sumter where the first shots of the Civil War landed.

Russ got to check off another item on his wish list; to visit the fort via our boat, not some overloaded tour boat. All you need to do is check the tour boat arrival times and join in with the group for the ranger’s talk about the fort.
Much larger than we imagined, most of what you see has been repaired and/or restored.

 

Tuesday night we anchored in a creek that led from the ICW out to the coast, in between Bull Island (the largest uninhabited barrier island on the east coast) and Capers Island. Wednesday morning we planned to explore (read that: beach comb) Capers for a bit before heading off on a rising tide and some favorable current.

Capers is an uninhabited barrier island just north of the Isle of Palms with about 3 miles of beach front. What makes it so interesting is that since the island’s existence, storms and tides have wreaked havoc on the shoreline. The whole deal is the place; the island, the wide flat beach at low tide or the high tide that flows right up into the forest of Palmettos, small oaks and pines. And as the ocean has been taking 15 feet of beachfront annually since time started, the trees have been uprooted, bleached by the sun and sea, and rearranged by nature’s order. The result is an awe-inspiring primitive appearance as if you’d gone back in time … an incredible place! Picture Jekyll Island’s Driftwood Beach with oodles more sandy beach.
We came across cannon ball jellyfish (how appropriate after our fort visit); not just a few, but hundreds scattered, left behind by the tide. I found three new conch-like shells; they look nothing like Queen or Milk Conch. A huge percentage of the shells were pre-drilled with perfect round holes near the top; how thoughtful of those worms to do that so I could string them up into a mobile or such other shell thing. (the shells, not the worms)
Our next stop worth mentioning was Georgetown, SC; a darling town with a fantastic fresh seafood market and a smelly paper mill. Between spring allergies and the paper mill (tolerable in certain wind directions, nauseating in others) Russ prefers to avoid Georgetown.

We hadn’t stopped here in a while and not since a fire destroyed several old buildings on Front Street. We anchored in an odd spot, just off the ICW channel in Winyah Bay and took Bunting in to the town floating docks. A quick walk around, fresh shrimp etc at Independent Seafood, finishing up with lunch.