Hurricane a comin

In September we had Draco hauled out had her bottom painted.  We had here hauled out in Arapaho North Carolina at Wayfarers Cove, this is near Oriental North Carolina.  It was skinny water getting back into the cove but we made it in with a north east wind.  Spent time visiting family and friends for a couple weeks in Illinois while this was being done.  I was not living on the boat in the boat yard in rain and 90 degrees.  When we got back around Sept 28th were watching the weather and found that hurricane Joaqin may head this direction.  So we pulled into Northwest Creek Marina in New Bern NC and we docked up here until the hurricane was gone.  We have never been in a hurricane before so we prepped the boat and waited.  We had lots of rain bands go through and some light winds but nothing other than local flooding.  We were lucky that the hurricane turned east out to sea.  We were prepared to evacuate.  The docks flooded over our knees so we had to wade to the boat for 3 days.  There was water in the marina building here about 8 inches for a couple of days and the crew here was right on top of the clean up.  Thank you Northwest staff for making everything easy before and after the storm.  We will be here for another week then we are headed south.  We are meeting up with our buddy boat Spindrift, we will cruise down the coast with them for 6 weeks.  I am sure I will have more to tell once we get out and about again.
As you may remember from my last post that we had ripped our mainsail.  We are anxiously awaiting our new main, in fact it was supposed to ship today.  Keep your fingers crossed.  It has been an expensive summer with getting the bottom painted and a new main.  This week the weather here has been in the 70's and cool at night.  Sunny everyday, you could not ask for better weather for October.  Kooper jumped ship this morning and we found him on the next boat over, silly ole cat,  the boat had floated to far away from the dock he could not get off he was over there throwing a fit.  Joe had to get on the other boat and carry him off. Luckily no one lives on that boat.  We have to keep a better eye on him.  TTFN

Measuring for new main sail

Island Pictures

Light House on Hunting Island

Hunting Island South Carolina

Mom and Baby Cumberland Island

Beached Cannonball Jellyfish

Horseshoe Crabs Cumberland Island Georgia

Sand Dunes Cumberland Island Georgia

The Golden Ticket

Continuing my story
We spent a very quiet night in the anchorage just outside of Charleston.  Next morning we prepared to leave it was cloudy and it looked like it would be a nice day.  Off on the ICW we went with the tide today we should make good time.  About 2 hours into our journey I looked behind us and I see a Coast Guard boat coming up on us.  I calmly take over driving so it doesn't look suspicious so Joe can go shut something down below just in case we get boarded.  And what do ya know we are going to get boarded!!  The Coast Guard boat pulls up beside us, I power back the throttle, they ask if we have gotten boarded recently,  I tell them no not on this boat, we had gotten boarded before when we were in Hawaii on a different boat.  Joe takes the lifeline down and we invite them aboard. Now we know they are out here to keep everyone safe so there is no need to get our hackles up.  We smile and say we are glad they are around,  and we proceed to cooperate in every way possible. There are two Coast Guard officers and a County Sheriffs Deputy on our boat and two more Coast Guard on the boat that stopped us. They tell me to resume normal speed and they drop back and proceed to follow us during our inspection.  They are very thorough and go through everything on the boat that needs checked, the head, life jackets, flares, whistles, air horn, all our documentation for the boat and others.  After about an hour they say we pass all the inspections and hand us a THE GOLDEN TICKET.  They tell us that we are good for a year so if we ever get stopped again within the year all we have to do is show our golden ticket and we should be good to go.  We say our thank you and wish them a good day and they are off.  After they leave we high five each other for passing the inspection.
That afternoon we are motoring along and we see storm clouds brewing ahead, our next anchorage is about 5 miles away, right where we are heading we look at our charts and we pull over in an anchorage because we do not want a repeat performance of the day before storm situation. We read in our cruising guide that this spot is buggy, boy was that an understatement, we get mobbed by bugs and mosquitoes it was like being in Minnesota at dusk.  We have to totally close up the boat and it is hot and muggy.  Muggy and Buggy all at the same time NOT a good combination!!! The fly squatter comes out and the bug spray is deployed.  I do believe we killed all the little critters.  They must not have seen humans for a while because the were relentless little suckers.  So sad such a lovely place to anchor and we can't even sit in the cockpit to enjoy our cocktails.  The storm we saw never did reach us but it is better to be cautious of these things. 
Our next stop is Southport North Carolina.  TTFN

Painted Water

Seeing old friends and stormy stuff

We pull anchor head through Watts Cut at mid tide we make it through the channel have a few more shallow spots but we are with the tide, heading for Charleston.  We are meeting up with our friends from Chesterfield Missouri, Denny and Shara Taylor.  They are on the east coast searching for a boat and happen to be in Charleston South Carolina to look at some boats.  We go have BBQ the first night they come and pick us up we have a nice evening visiting.  Next morning we get picked up at St. Johns Island Marina, wonderful place to anchor and they have beautiful facilities complete with restaurant and pool.  We go to another marina where we look at a Beneteau with the Taylors. Then we head over to the ferry landing and we buy tickets to go out to Fort Sumter, where the civil war began.  We board the ferry and get the tour and history of the Fort, it was worth the tour.  It is extremely hot and we are all done in and hungry when we get back to the van. The four of us head back to St. Johns Marina and have dinner at the restaurant there.  We say good bye to the Taylors they are leaving for Annapolis the next morning in search for their dream boat.  We hang out in Charleston the next day and take care of some business.  Next morning we head in to get fuel, water and ice.  Head out to Charleston Harbor put up the jib as our main is ripped beyond repair.  Yes we have to buy a new main sail it will be a huge expense.  Sailing across Charleston Harbor we run across a youth sailing school in their opti's.  It is blowing 12 to 17 and these little kids are out there having a ball.  We are looking to make the 6:00 opening on the bridge we are headed for then anchor for night.  Well we make it to bridge around 4:30 and we have to wait on the bridge meanwhile we anchor and wait as 6:00 approaches the skies start getting darker from the east and we hear rumbles of thunder.  We approach the bridge and the bridge master informs us that bad storms are approaching and that he will not open the bridge due to the storm that is about to hit.  Wind gusts of up to 40 we found out soon enough.  We turn back up the channel and it starts to rain hard we try to get farther but the storm is so bad by now that we can hardly see and the winds have piped up to gusts of 40 torrential rains.    We finally get an anchor down but we are in too shallow of water and the storm pushes us up on a sand bar.  Joe was smart enough to leave the motor running and in gear with the wheel hard over so we do not get pushed ashore.  I was hoping we do not have to call Tow Boat.  We are hammered by the storm for about 30 minutes then it starts to clear.  Bridge Master calls us and says he will open anytime we are ready.  We inform him that we are aground and we will be a while till we figure how to get off.  It took some doing and Joe crawled out on the boom, we pushed it all the way out and he was bounced up and down on it and he heard a pop.  He popped a rib out of place.  I could tell he was hurting but he kept working to get us ungrounded.  We finally got off the sand bar and we went through the bridge anchored just other side of bridge for the night in a very quiet place.  It has been a very interesting week.

Sail Problems

First day from Beaufort, July 20, we are heading north out of St. Helena Sound towards the Edisto River and Watts cut.  We know we have to make Watts Cut before low tide.  So we are sailing along have both sails up the wind is with us today. Pretty uneventful day until ...... we get to the entrance to Watts Cut.  The winds have picked up to about 15 to 20 during the day and when we go to drop sail we jibe and our main sail rips.  As we prepare to drop the main it tears more and more.  Nothing we can do at the moment.  Then we are trying to to furl in the jib and the spinnaker line gets wrapped in the sail and it is flapping and snapping like crazy Joe finally gets it unwrapped and we try to head into Watts cut.  It is now close to low tide and at the entrance we touch bottom we are afraid to just plow through the rest as we will have to wait for the tide to come in and we do not want to run hard aground.  So we turn around and head up a small creek where we know there is enough water to anchor for the night.  It is getting dark and it is time to quit for the day. We will assess  the damage when things are calmer.

Hangin with Mr. Kooper

In blogs past I introduced you to our cat Kooper.  We adopted him when he was 5 weeks old and he has been a pretty good cat. He has lived and moved around Illinois and moved to Florida to live with Tim while he was in college, then he moved back to live with us after college, so he has been around some. Those of you who are not cat people are probably thinking there are no good cats.  LOL.  Kooper is 10 now and has adapted to living on Draco rather well. Guess he did not have a choice in the matter either.  He didn't much like boat living at first and hid a lot where he could find hiding places. Hatted hated hated it when we fired up the engine and tried to make himself very small when we did.  During rough weather he has gotten sea sick a few times but now seems to have gotten the motion of the boat pretty well.  We have sliding cupboard doors for access to shelves, not in the galley, and Kooper looked at me one day and wanted me to open the door to let him in I told him no but if he could open it himself he was welcome to get in there.  Well he got scared one day and pushed open the cupboard door and crawled up on the shelf and hid in there everyday for weeks when we started up the engine.  We called it his hidey hole.  He started slowly coming out when we were at anchor and coming into the cockpit and checking out the boat.  Now he has the run of the boat and most nights when we are at anchor he just sits on the bow and looks around.  Actually he usually stays out all night.  We set anchor turn the engine off and yell down to Kooper that we are done for the day and he comes out of whenever he has chose to hunker down that day.  These days he lies under the table in the center of the boat. When we got back to Lady's Island Marina in South Carolina we docked up for the month and we have to watch him very closely so he doesn't get off the boat.  If you were on a boat for 12 weeks and got to a dock you would want off too.  It was good during the day but 2 nights after we docked he jumped ship onto the dock and we lost him.  We looked everywhere for the entire day but could not find him.  Last time I saw him he was on the boat about 2 A.M.  We were sick with worry and did not know if would ever see him again.  Next night we went to bed but sleep did not come easy because we were missing our little guy.  Joe got up around 3:30 A.M and went looking for him again.  I hear him come back and he has an orange fur ball in his arms, alive but hurt, tears were shed that we had our buddy back.  Kooper was unable to walk his back legs would not work.  We had to wait until the vet opened to take him in and get him checked so we kept him still and warm until then.  He was in bad shape.  It kept going through my mind that we were going to loose him.  Once at the vet's office they examined him, took an x ray and determined that he had a broken pelvis and that it would heal on it's own.  Thank God.  They sent us off with pain meds and said he would heal up on his own just fine.  We will never know how he got so badly injured. We are sure it ate up a couple of his 9 lives.  He did develop an abscess

on his side that the vet missed I treated it for a week and it finally dried up and went away. Now 4 weeks later he is doing great and we are hangin with Mr. Kooper again. 

Dumplings for Breakfast

Just got back from the local farmers market.  I invited a couple of the ladies here that do not have cars to get around to go with me.  Had to go today there is a lady there that makes homemade Chinese dumplings that melt in you mouth.  Guess what I had for breakfast?  Yummo! Not a conventional breakfast but nothing about cruising is conventional. Also went out to St. Helena Island to Barefoot farms and picked up a pound of fresh caught shrimp to cook for dinner tonight.  Shrimp season just started here so we can buy them pretty cheap.  We also have fresh fruits and vegetables readily available and locally grown.  I love the low country.
The other night we went to my friend Jude's house for Italian food. It was a wonderful evening with lots of wine and delicious food.  Jude entertained us with endless stories about growing up in an Italian family in Boston.  She has the full Boston accent and she is hysterical,we laughed for hours  I told here she should be a stand up comic.  Jude has two rescue dogs on was quiet and sweet the other would not come near us and barked the whole time we were there.  Oh well.
It has turned very hot and humid here now and it is hard to stay cool during the afternoon hours.  We usually find an excuse to go to the store or someplace in the truck to get into some air conditioning.  Guess is the price you pay for being in the south and it isn't even full out summer yet.  We plan on hauling the boat out sometime in July up in North Carolina to paint the bottom.  And work on the stuffing box.  That should be fun.  NOT!!!! Hope to see our friends in Carlyle and St. Louis very soon.  TTFN.