HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OUR FAVORITE SON, JAMES!
Up at 7:00 am to make some headway during the cool morning hours, with a destination of the Harborwalk Marina in Georgetown. This was our first day to see alligators in the water ... kinda unsettling, but they look just like a log floating in the water. This part of the ICW is very pretty. It's a fairly straight course with beautiful homes on one side and the outer banks separating the ocean on the other side.
View from the bow.
View to port.
View to starboard.
View to stern.
The day should have been an uneventful transit of about 40 miles; the weather wasn't even too terrible because there was ample cloud cover and a nice breeze.
That was before Nancy drove the boat onto a sandbar. At about 11:30 our pleasant day came to an end. As I was watching the depth get shallower, I let the boat slowly drift away from the upcoming turn in the river, figuring that shoaling at the curve was the cause. Watching the GPS track and the depth sounder and the river conditions meant that somehow I missed keeping an eye on the channel marker, and we went hard aground just 10 feet outside the channel. Stupid mistake on my part ... always stay in the channel... I knew better ... so hearing that "everyone runs aground in the ICW was little consolation. We were on a rising tide, so we threw out the anchor and prepared to wait a few hours for the tide to help float us off.
Instead, a good samaritan by the name of Robin Leigh came and helped us out instead. She was a BIG motor yacht, and instead of speeding by like the other 4-5 boats that passed us, she slowed down to see if we needed help. Boy, do we need help! So we dropped the dinghy, and Dan rowed our longest rope over to their boat, and once we were connected, it just took one pull from behind to get us off and free again.
Yah!
No pictures of this event! It cost us about an hour of our day, and most of my accumlated confidence, and off we went to Georgetown.
No comments:
Post a Comment