After an overnight sail from the St Marys Inlet, John slowed our arrival at Charleston to co-incide with the flood tide. The current in Charleston is between 2 and 3 knots and the anchorage off the town dock is tricky. The holding is poor and the bottom is littered with old moorings and other obstructions.
The Charleston City Marina is now known as the MegaDock. If anchored out it is $5 to use their dinghy facility.
Ten minutes by dinghy up the Ashley River at Brittlebank Park with a free dinghy dock, is a great playground, it is also on the downtown CARTA bus route.
Jack and James spent hours in the city Aquarium intrigued by a huge, two storey tank full of all kinds of sea life, touching and holding sea creatures and playing on a replica fishing boat.
The other big hit was the Lowlands Children’s Museum which offered a water play area, shrimper fishing boat, castle, arts and crafts room, play shop and Toddler’s area where James tumbled about with John participating from a bean bag. It is more an excellent facility for childsplay than museum but at $7 a day we didn’t care. The boys were entertained and a little educated.
The next days visit to the USS Yorktown an air craft carrier (submarine and other ships) on a permanent
berth at Patriot’s Point spun Jack up even more. The boys had Top Fun in the cockpit of a WWII plane. For us it was an exhausting visit negotiating the boys through submarine watertight doors, up and down steep metal ladders which even with their boat training were intimidating. Of course it’s not so easy to order them “stop running”, when a whole hangar or flight deck with fast planes stretches out around them. Incidentally, but importantly, Jack had not seen Top Gun, he has seen the “making” of the film - lots of fast fighter jets doing tricks, Daddy’s day care.
On leaving Charleston the anchorage served up it’s final ugly experience. Our first choice was the charming, safe and good holding of nearby Wappoo Creek, but, we didn’t follow our instinct and experience, and suffered accordingly. As they left, Synchronicity pulled up an anchor, probably the same one we helped to untangle on another boat four years ago, Seraphim pulled up a twenty foot log, and Seawalk a bunch of roots
And onto North Carolina, 460 miles to Norfolk.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment