Georgetown on Our Mind

We toured Georgetown in cold rain over the two days we were there. The Harborwalk Marina is a minimalist facility offering a restroom with running water (especially when it rains due to leaks in the roof) and, well...that's pretty much it. It is conveniently situated close to town and within sight and smell of both the paper mill and the steel mill. The town, however, offers a 19th century main street worthy of Disney World with several nice restaurants and maybe the world's only rice museum. We took advantage of both the restaurants and the museum, coming away filled with good food and more information about rice growing than most would like to know; but which I feel compelled to share.

The museum features dioramas (like those I remember from grade school) and a video depicting how rice was grown from the mid 1700's through the mid 19th century. This plantation based economy thrived on the backs of a large slave population (my characterization, not theirs). The 1860 census reports "393,975 named persons holding 3,950,546 unnamed slaves" (It must have been very confusing with that many slaves not having names!). Based on growing techniques learned from their East African slaves (this fact was not included in the exhibit) Georgetown grew to become the world's leading exporter of rice; making it the richest per capita county in the U.S at the time(assuming you count the Black population as property and don't include them in calculating per capita income, also unsaid in the exhibit). An ingenious system of flood gates controlled the tides to provide an ideal rice growing environment (it also provided a great breeding ground for malarial mosquitos; avoided by plantation owners by summer homes in Charleston). The museum exhibit consistently refers to slaves as "laborers" and characterizes the pre-Civil War era as a golden age destroyed by the Civil War, sometimes referred as the "War Between the States", when the plantation owners lost their "labor source....without compensation." Today, no rice is grown in South Carolina.

Interestingly, the museum features only two individuals of note, both African American: Ruby Forsythe, an educator; and Joseph Hayne Rainey, the first African-American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Having exhausted the culinary and cultural delights of Georgetown, we cast off around 3:00 pm for Charleston. After reviewing Skipper Bob's waterway guide and waterwayguide.com, we determined that staying on the ICW would be very difficult due to extreme shoaling in a number of areas. This again is due to the fact that no funding has been provided to keep the waterway anything close to the designed 12' controlling depth. Therefore, we headed down Winyah Bay to the ocean passing a shrimp boat drying its nets as it headed home and accompanied by numerous dolphin. Just over 70 NM away, Charleston required an overnight sail to arrive in daylight. Our departure was timed perfectly to put us outside the Winyah Bay Entrance just as dusk fell and we turned SSW. No wind, again, and calm seas prevailed. We saw nothing over 10 knots of wind and our instruments usually reported 5-6 knots. It was chilly but not uncomfortable with no seas to speak of. The biggest challenge was not to arrive too early. We normally average 5-6 knots per hour. This would put us at Charleston harbor in the dead of night. Leaving Georgetown before dark and arriving at Charleston after daybreak meant going about half that speed.

Pat and I took turns on watch, napping in the cockpit, and checking our course. We saw few other boats. A misty, gibbous moon forecast rain but provided light enough for us to see the surrounding water. The moonlight offset somewhat the usual 'cocoon-like' feeling you get at night with only your boat's light for reference. The person on watch scans the darkness for other boats and checks instruments, interspersed with listening to the radio, reading and, in my case, occasionally talking to myself (a rare opportunity to finish sentences on my own).

We arrived just outside Charleston a little early and circled for about 1/2 hour until morning. Several ships awaited pilots just outside the entrance channel and we gave them a wide berth. With light, we proceeded toward the harbor soon accompanied by fog and rain. Charleston's harbor entrance is well lit and, as it turned out, we would have been better off entering in darkness rather than fog. The good news is that no other idiots were out there and we had no difficulties. The deep, well marked harbor led us to the megayacht Charleston City Marina where our, by now, our old cruising buddies, Mike and Joy of Fiona Rios, were docked.