It was the best of times and the worst of times 🙂 lol now that I have the plagerism out of the way I will just call it an interesting time.
Patty and I took the boat out Saturday night at Murrels Inlet, SC. and came back Sunday afternoon. Technically we did this, but not quite according to the plan. The plan was to be on the water about 4 or 5 saturday afternoon and take our time finding a place on the marsh behind Murrels Inlet to anchor for the night. Watch the sunset and just generally kick back. Well life being what it is we didn’t get to my house to pick the boat up till 5pm, 45 minutes of prep-time later we are on the road.
I’m not sure what is happening but the trailer is not very steady and seems to be getting worse. I am now very seldom exceeding 45 mph or the trailer will start to shimmy back and forth if you hit a bump or move side to side suddenly. It is very unnerving, not to mention dangerous.
It took about an hour to get to surfside where I picked up a second anchor from my friend Steve’s house and then a quick trip to Food Lion for some supplies and chinese take out from the next door cat cookery 🙂 (actually I’m pretty sure it really was sweet and sour chicken and not cat) 🙂
Arrival at the public landing in Murrels Inlet at about 8:30 to 8:45. It was very quiet, we only saw a couple of other people coming and going from the landing. The landing is very nice. Three very nice concrete ramps and two docks, one on either side of the ramps. The parking lot for the landing accross the street can probably hold just under a hundred vehicles with trailers. There was no posted signs about overnight parking so we left the van and trailer there. (we had no problems) It looks like about 20 other people were still out on the water or there overnight from the vehicles that were in the parking lot.
Both me and Patty were exhausted and we hadn’t even rigged the boat yet. I asked Patty to double check everything I was doing and that I would do the same for her. We didn’t want to make a mistake as tired as we were that would damage the boat or trailer. Motor on motor mount. Raise the mast, take mounts for mast in the down position off the boat, mount the rudder, mount the boom, pack all the stuff still in van on the boat, extend the tongue of trailer. This was the only place where we made a mistake. We forgot to disconnect the trailer wiring for the brake lights and it ripped apart when we pulled the tongue out. However, this was not the first time this had happened. The last time it did, I repaired it with quick disconnects between the trailer wiring plug and the rest of the trailer wiring on each individual wire. It pulled apart at these disconnects so no damage was done. We also forgot the blocks for the tires of the trailer for extending the tongue. We made do by taking some line and tying one end to a post and tying the other end to the trailer to hold the trailer in place while pulling the tounge out the 7 or 8 feet it needed to come. This worked perfectly.
Actually putting the boat in the water was anti-climatic. Everything went very smoothly. Van and trailer to the parking lot across the street and then we organized the interior of the boat while still tied to the dock. All the stuff we had thrown in took up all the cabin space. However after organizing it all, making the bed with the bedding in the v-berth, putting away all boat related stuff in the back of one quarter berth and our personal stuff in the back of the other v-berth, re-organizing all the food stuff into the two coolers and so on, there was actually plenty of room to sit and move around in the cabin.
All this took much longer than normal due to us just being dog tired. By now it was 10:30 on a moonless night, with us just leaving the dock. I have kayaked on this marsh during the day a few times and also once or twice on the full moon at night. However, with a kayak we didn’t tend to follow the boat channels so I was not familar with the channel markers or how the channel ran other than in a real general way. I had no map of the inlet. (need to get a map) As we left the dock and moved away from the lights along the waterfront it got dark. Visability of only 30 or 40 feet was now a big problem. It would be easy to accidently get off the channel we needed to follow out to the inlet itself and go aground in the shallower water in one of the many channels that run through the marsh there. Luckly I had packed my 6 cell pelican dive light. 🙂 Patty went up on the bow and used it as a spot light to find the channel markers and to keep us away from the banks where it gets real shallow. Between the channel markers and my foggy memory of how the channel ran we finally got the the inlet.
There was a lot of traffic around the inlet area. Lots of fishermen out gigging for flounder around that part of the marsh. Each of them an island of bright floodlights. Some of them running off of batteries but some of them accompanied by the whine of small generators powering the floodlights. The indistinct shape of two people hovering over the pools of light shining underwater as they poled the boats along the shore with the gigging poles. Every once in a while you would see a pole stab down into the pool of light and come up with a thrashing flounder that would disappear into the unlit boat on the end of the pole.
I decided to move on to the south side of the inlet into the marsh and find a place to anchor for the night. I had had that in mind from the beginning as I remembered it as an area that got less traffic than others yet had one deeper channel that would be good to anchor in. With Patty still standing sentinal in the bow I slowly motored in that direction. With no channel markers and no moon I soon became disoriented. The next day I found that the channel I had been in was the one that I wanted, but at the time I was looking for another channel off to the side of that channel. After twice running aground trying to go up side channels we gave up and turned back for the inlet.
Just to the north of the inlet mouth is a red channel marker. It lies about 150 feet off the beach of the point there. We anchored the boat between the channel marker and the beach. The point sheltered us from the wind and the water laid quiet. The only problem was boat traffic in the main channel just 60 feet away and the wakes they would generate. Only the small flat bottomed flounder boats were out that late at night and they didn’t cause more than small ripples.
It was now midnight with both of us moving in a fog. Patty was very chilled from being up on the bow so we made some hot tea on the propane burner and sat for a few moments sipping it to warm us up.
We put the mosquito screens up on the bow hatch and the companionway, then crawled into bed. The boat was quiet with just a small rocking motion to lull us to sleep 🙂 which came fast. 🙂
Continued in another post later 🙂 What happpened through the night and the exciting events of Sunday. 🙂
Scott
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