It's a New Year, let's be good to our blog.

Rather than explain where I have been for the last nine months to a silent digital audience I will instead do a little of this: (and then tell a nice story about Quiet)

I have been tested by Beaufort.  But it’s a New Year and I am finally getting the F out of here.  Next stop-Savannah (more on that to come).  It’s not my style to really believe that there is much of a will behind the way the world works.  But looking back at my time here, especially knowing that I’m finally leaving, it’s a bit of a revelation to see the big picture of what this past year taught me.  The message is so clear now, and I admit my pride has taken a bit of a hit at realizing how obvious it all is.  January 1^st of 2012 I made the decision to make the final liquidation of my assets and move the boat to the coast no matter the cost, and disregarding that I knew I couldn’t afford it.  At the time I felt trapped, landlocked on a lake in the middle of the Carolinas.  I wasn’t saving money as I once was due in large part to an hour long commute inflating my gas costs.  I was having immediate relationship problems with my parents, and I was ready for a change of pace.  Funny enough I think I was in South Carolina when I had the urge to flee.  I was on my way back to Charlotte, on the highway (an excellent place for revelations, epiphanies, and prophecies).   Little did I know that S. Carolina would become my Davey Jones’ Locker, trapping me, testing me, trying to drown the dream with all hands aboard.  *Trying.

What lay ahead for me back then was discomfort, fear, anxiety, and a very tangible sense of ongoing adventure.  It is addictive, and when the miles tick by and the nights of fretful sleep anchored in the middle of nowhere end and you step out into the morning light realizing you’ve survived another night the exhilaration is delicious.  Underequipped and alone.  That kind of adventure got replaced upon my arrival in Beaufort with a different kind; how to make enough cash to keep moving.  That meant learning new things, making new contacts and trying to use my skill set to get the most out of my life and my time in a new place.

I don’t want this to be a forum for bitching like so many blogs can be, so I’ll leave it at that.  I also appreciate that a bulk of my trip has yet to be documented here.  However, I’ve sort of lost track of the chronology and my memory won’t do the trip justice.  But rather than deprive you of any decent plot I will describe one day and two nights I spent anchored just south of Myrtle Beach.  When I think of the trip down I always think of that stop for some reason.  I think it might represent in my mind the freedom I felt alone on the water.

I was here:

In the middle of nowhere, pretty inland South Carolina, I pulled up with enough light to carefully anchor and then dramatically do some work for my old job.  I had to use my phone to hook the computer to the internet and took care of some last minute work my coworkers in offices around the country needed done.  Anyway once I was finished with that I sat in the cockpit and watched a hawk bringing nesting material back to the top of a piling that had an ICW marker signpost mounted on it.  I could hear the baby hawks calling out to their mother when she flew off to find nesting material.  The water was as flat as glass and the spot was very well protected from the wind.  It was so quite that even though I couldn’t see the chicks I could hear them. 

Many quiet cups of tea and perhaps a wildlife documentary later it was dark and I got in bed.  Very quickly I realized how much I would need to get used to the quiet.  The mangroves came alive at night, the creature calls were vivid, and close.  Like predators were stalking... but I'm on a boat.  Can jaguars swim?  Cats...
As the tide drew water across my boat all night I could hear the myriad of minutia scraping along my hull.  Picture a night so still that a twig floating down a river bumps into the hull of a boat and because it’s the lowlands (they call it The Lowcountry here) the water is moving so very slowly along… well inside the boat it’s as if that sound gets amplified and you can’t hear anything else since you’re paranoid already that the anchor is slipping or something as bad, and you’re trying to go to sleep too early with too much energy after a full day of mostly sitting still behind a wheel pulling on some ropes from time to time. All. Day.  But you don’t have electricity besides some dim cabin lights- no company, no booze.

Then suddenly a slightly larger twig suddenly strikes causing you to jump every few minutes.  That first night was all about the primal ability to listen intensely, especially as you let your guard down.

By the next morning I was used to the twigs and was relishing the one day I didn’t sail and the only day I stopped for my entire trip into South Carolina.  I was looking forward to reading outside in the windless weather.  I had been battered around at the coast for long enough.  So I read an ancient copy of one of the Sherlock Holmes sequels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (whose name I love) that was passed to me when I was younger by my great uncle John Ash.  The best part was that it had been such a long time since I read the tales as a child that I didn’t remember a single one of the mysteries.

Drank more tea… PB&J again, it was really quiet.  All day.  I had gotten used to weeks of day in day out feeling pressed to keep moving, to keep running no matter what.  It was eerie to be fighting what I had gotten used to in order to sit and relax and enjoy the environment.  Probably gave in watched another nature documentary on my laptop to break up the silence with the soothing and subtly inspired voice of David Attenborough tell me about migratory patterns of the snowbirds… or whatever.  Phonebook.

 I made up my mind to leave early the next day and stock up on supplies by stopping at a marina down the way.  Middle of the night, I suddenly wake.  Something about the gentle movements the  boat was making had changed.  It was so subtle I immediately chalked it up to the paranoia that had been haunting my sleeping hours with its chaotic silence.  But I got up to check anyway.  Out in the cockpit looking into the oily black-dark water of the night with a flashlight there it is, the mother of all twigs.

I had a limb, a very large limb that had snagged somewhere beneath the boat.  It was big enough I could see it from both sides of the boat.  Crap.  It’s the middle of the night I’m not even awake.  Is it caught on the keel or the rudder?  Keel would be ok, but rudder would be bad.  I can’t see, much less operate the boat in this dark to free myself.  I tried poking it with the blunt end of my docking hook.  It hasn’t broken anything yet.  It’ll have to wait until morning.  A few more hours of light, often interrupted sleep later I got up at dawn and slowly make preparations to free myself.  I poked it some more. 

UPDATE: I found the documentation of this Limb!

Finally I decided that because the boat was pointed into the current my best bet would be to back off of the tree limb.  Started her up and gunned it in reverse and ran away from the dislodged massive tree limb.  When I got to the marina to ride my bike into town for groceries… I was a bit of a mess.  Like I had been camping and wasn’t quite ready to hop back into society.  I wasn’t.  But I lived.  It was a good time.

Oh, and here are some pictures...