This week we're hanging around in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Commodore Says: "We Can Haz Visitorz?"

The Commodore's aunt, Venerable Great Aunt (VGA) Diane may visit next week. So, for this week, we're just hanging out.

12th. Monday.

Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

Cleaned out some of the stuff we jammed in the V-berth two months ago. Finished lubricating the deck winches. Rewired the power supply on the alternator's regulator so that it doesn't draw current then the engine is in "standby" (alarms enabled, but key actually off.)

The Cooper River Marina has a shuttle van, at about 11:30 they can run you over to the Publix for grocery shopping. They pick you up about a half hour later to bring you back.

Dinner was our first pizza made in the Force 10 oven. Need to work on temperature control to get it a little crispier.

We're looking closely at the transmit maps of Charleston. We think that we can ride our bikes two miles to Spruill road; get on the route 11 bus and be downtown pretty quickly. That may be tomorrow's big adventure: rigging the bikes and heading out.

Travel

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Arrive	Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

13th. Tuesday

Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

Unfolded the folding bikes and rode over to the corner of Burton and Spruill on the #11 route. It's a pretty bleak intersection between the Navy Base Road ("Viaduct Rd.") and Spruill. There's the Charleston-A convenience store, a small church and almost nothing else. We like the idea of locking our bikes to the church fence. Who would mess with bikes in front of a church?

From there we took the bus downtown. At the visitor's center, we bought two 10-ride bus cards. Now we can go downtown any time we have the urge for southern cooking, sightseeing, museums, art galleries, shopping, movies, fancy coffee, history or any of those other features of a great urban area.

Lunch at Tommy Condon's pub; they're offering full traditional Thanksgiving dinner. We think we'll be back there for Thanksgiving. Diane will probably be here then, so she can drive us. Otherwise, we'll have to rely on the reduced holiday bus schedule.

We walked up and down Meeting, King and Church streets to get a feel for Charleston. Then it turned chilly and started spitting rain, so we took the bus back to our bikes.

Dinner was A Tasty Frittata.

Tomorrow, we may take the bus further into North Charleston to visit the West Marine. We need a few things like Six10 Epoxy, some LED replacement bulbs, a replacement fixture for the galley and some winch lube.

Or we may go back downtown and wander around some more. There are innumerable walking tours. Also, we do know one person who lives here, and we might give her a call.

Travel

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Arrive	Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

14th. Wednesday

Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

When we started, we broke our first trip down the ICW into two sections.

1. Deltaville to Charleston. This breaks down into two smaller trips:

2. Deltaville to Beaufort, mile 204. This was relatively easy to plan in detail because it's just a few more-or-less standard stops along the ICW. The point of this leg is to avoid Cape Hatteras by going inside. Weather doesn't matter (much) so it's a matter of motoring down the ditch with stops for fuel, laundry and green veggies. Yes, we got hit by hurricane Sandy, but there are hurricane holes all along those North Carolina rivers.

3. Beaufort to Charleston, mile 469. This was more difficult to plan in detail for two reasons. First, there are several typical routes: continue inside down the ICW, sail offshore from Beaufort to Charleston, or use various combinations of inside and outside. Second, it depends on conditions at sea, something you don't really "plan" on, but check daily until they're favorable.

4. Charleston to Florida; specifically No Name Harbor on Key Biscayne. Mile 1096.

The idea was to break the complexity of a 1,100 mile voyage into some smaller, more intellectually manageable passages. And also to defer planning for the offshore passages until we were ready to go and all that was left was checking the offshore conditions.

We knew that things would break, and we'd be stopping to fix stuff: replacing the engine's main circulating water pump, for example. We also suspected there would be optimizations and improvements: re-wiring the alternator regulator comes to mind. We knew, also, there would be some resupply issues: we need way more water filters, for example.

Looking at Part II, above (Charleston to Florida) there are actually two sections to this part of the trip.

II.A. Charleston to St. Mary's, Georgia, mile 712. The point of this leg is to avoid low country and it's complex tides, currents and inept dredging of the cuts. South Carolina isn't so bad. Georgia, according to some folks, isn't doing an effective job of maintaining their part of the ICW.

This, too, can be done a variety of ways. The ICW mileage is 244 twisty-turny miles; 34 hours of diesel-burning spread over four to six days, depending on currents and the locations of anchorages. Because of tides, currents, shoaling and dredging, this is unappealing. It does avoid bad weather off shore.

An alternative is to do this in one overnight trip. The outside rhumb line is about 150 miles. This is 30 hours; only a few hours of motoring at each end of the passage. Then a day or two of rest in St. Mary's. With a good weather window, this seems sensible. We did an overnighter to Charleston and it worked out well.

A third choice is to do six, shorter, offshore passages. Each of these would be a day sail from anchorage to anchorage. This would involve 12 to 24 hours of motoring all told.

I think this would work out as follows:

• Charleston to St. Pierre Creek in the St. Helena Sound

• St. Pierre Creek to Port Royal in the Port Royal Sound

• Port Royal to Turner Creek in the Wassaw Sound (up the Wilmington River)

• Turner Creek to Wahoo River in the Sapelo Sound

• Wahoo River to Jekyll Island using St. Simon Sound

• Jekyll Island to St. Mary's in Cumberland Sound

The complexity is waiting for all six weather windows. It might take two weeks to have six good sailing days this time of year.

These are in four different weather zones: AMZ350, AMZ352, AMZ354, AMZ450. Currently, the AMZ35x zones have nasty weather like this—"N winds 15 to 20 kt with gusts to 25 kt. Seas 4 to 5 ft. A chance of showers."—until next Monday. Days and days of cold, stinky weather that only gets colder and stinkier as the season advances.

II.B. St. Mary's to Key Biscayne, mile 1096. Not ready to think about this yet. First, we need to get to St. Mary's.

Before thinking about places to go, we need to experience the places we are.

Today, we biked to the bus stop and took the #11 into town. We looked over the City Marina (which was too full for us when we arrived.) We looked at the anchorage over on the Ashley river. The current is ferocious, and the anchorage has a large number of boats, but it looked manageable: there seemed to be big gaps into which we might fit Red Ranger.

We visited Nancy, who moved down to Charleston from Niskayuna, NY; she's a former neighbor and member of the same Methodist church as us. We are good friends with her daughter Paula and son-in-law George. And some of her grandkids are close friends with our kids. She's got a darling "basement" apartment under her son's magnificent Charleston house. She gave us lunch and some more tips on what to see and do around Charleston.

[Note to self: Avoid going back to buy more Pralines. They're way too good.]

On the way back, the #11 bus was late. One of the people waiting for the bus recognized us from the trip into Charleston from North Charleston this morning. If we keep this up, we'll become two more regular riders of this route, and we'll become a part of this North Charleston neighborhood. We'll be able to meet and greet our neighbors who are going to work in the morning or coming home in the evening.

We have to remember to break off our sight-seeing around 3-ish to catch the 4-ish bus so that we get back before it's dark. If we wait for the 5-ish bus, we're biking in the dark. It's not a bad bike ride past the FLETC in the dark because there's zero traffic on the road to the marina.

Dinner was a sauté of random stuff (including cauliflower and potatoes) served over penne pasta.

Since we have shore power, and it's cold (11°C, 51°F) and blowing 10+; we're running our electric cabin heaters.

Travel

Attribute	Value
Arrive	Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

15th. Thursday

Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

Cold, blowing and rainy. Not a good day to ride down to the bus stop to go to Charleston. It would be a good day to hunker down in coffee shops and bars, alternating between hot drinks and cold. But we'd have to get there first.

With shore power and marginally working Wi-Fi, however, it's not half so challenging as being in Pungo Creek for Hurricane Sandy.

I do have some interior jobs I should be doing. Instead I'm ~~wasting~~ spending time playing the ukelele and buying more books for my Kindle. Eventually, I may learn the Wild Rover song.

[Actually, I don't have enough #12 wood screws or ¼″×1″ oval-head machine screws.]

CA is making our holiday cards.

We had our mail forwarded by St. Brendan's Isle. Our IRS change of address needs to be filed again. Something about the first try was unacceptable, so we'll try that again.

Dinner was Winter Vegetable & Tofu Korma.

Tomorrow's weather may be nicer; allowing us to go into Charleston for more hanging around.

Travel

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Arrive	Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

16th. Friday

Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

Much nicer weather today than yesterday. Biked over to the bus stop. Arrived just as the #11 bus is pulling away. Sigh. Walked down the block to where the #10 bus stops, and took that into town. They all wind up at the visitor's center, anyway, so there's little practical difference.

Saw sights.

Lunch at Hyman's Seafood.

Did some shopping for running clothes. While you can run in a T-shirt and shorts, it's much more fun to have a stylish running shirt, capri-length pants and a running jacket.

Dinner was pasta with summer squash and goat cheese.

Tomorrow is the fabled farmer's market in Charleston. And the weather is still fair for a bike ride and walkabout. Sunday we have to be careful of the bus schedule so we don't wind up coming back well after dark. Monday, Venerable Great Aunt Diane arrives, so we'll stay on the boat and do laundry and any final cleanup.

Travel

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Arrive	Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

17th. Saturday

Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

Biked to the bus stop. Took the #11 downtown.

Went to the famous Charleston farmer's market. It was every bit as nice as folks described. It's respectably large with a good selection of actual farm produce with arts and crafts scattered around.

Some "Farmer's Markets" are more arts and crafts than anything else. The produce selection here did not disappoint. Instead, we were grumpy that we couldn't buy more fresh veggies.

The Ithaca, NY, market or the Syracuse, NY, markets seemed larger even though those cities are smaller than Charleston. But, those markets are in the agricultural heartland. Since we haven't been to either one of those in years and years, that could just be a slip in our recollection.

We had lunch at a place we called the Olde Towne Grille. It's properly called the Old Towne Grill and Seafood, but why add a useless "e" to only one word?

Back on Red Ranger, it was time to do laundry, vacuum and wash the cabin sole afternoon.

We also checked the water tanks carefully. The starboard tank is almost (but not quite) empty. It needs to have some sand and aluminum chloride grit vacuumed out of it when it finally does get down to empty. The port tank (which we've been trying not to use) is about ¾ full. I would have been happier with "nearly at the top" full, but it's possible we've got a slow leak.

Dinner was was hand-made pasta from the farmer's market with summer squash and goat cheese; this time with "Candy of the Sea", anchovies.

Travel

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Arrive	Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

18th. Sunday

Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

Rainy. Windy. Cold.

A good day for baking.

And ditching the Previous Owner's collection of receipts.

When we first got Red Ranger, we carefully entered everything from the maintenance log into a spreadsheet.

But, we ignored the giant file storage box of receipts.

Just for good measure, I created a big spreadsheet with the entire history of the boat based on the receipts. Not an essential thing, but perhaps informative at some point in the future. So, I patiently summarized each receipt so that we could chuck them knowing that we'd captured some of the information.

The historical "loose receipts" folder from the previous owner had 411 receipts adding to almost $120,000 of post-purchase equipment and services.

There's even some paper spreadsheets that cover the first few years of ownership. I think these are for the years when Red Ranger was named Sandpiper and was owned by Sandpiper Industries, Inc.

Once I've got all that data, I can do some summarization. Not too much, since I didn't carefully break out labor and parts from each individual invoice.

But I did, for example, find the invoice for rebuilding the transmission when the transmission cooler failed. And all of those invoices for oil cooler replacements; what does that mean?

Dinner was hand-made pasta from the farmer's market with summer squash, garbanzos, and a tomato-pesto sauce.

Travel

Attribute	Value
Arrive	Docked at 32°49.93′N 079°56.03′W

This Week

Engine Hours: 0. Diesel Gallons: 0. ICW Miles: 0.

Books: Started Circle of Bones, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Read Aloud: finished A Clash of Kings: A Song of Ice and Fire; started A Storm of Swords: A Song of Ice and Fire.

Travel

Attribute	Value
Engine	0. h
Fuel	0. gal
Distance	0. nm