Our next stop was Beaufort, South Carolina. Beaufort (the Beau pronounced like in beautiful) is located on an island, and is famous as the first place in the U.S. to free slaves after the emancipation proclamation. Just after the Civil War began, Northern navy forces sailed into the area and captured the islands and towns. Because of this, white residents fled the area leaving behind their slaves, who were freed by the U.S.
Forrest Gump was filmed here. The bench describes different scenes from the movie. They used various houses in Beaufort as the locations for the film. Even the Vietnam sequences were filmed here, on one of the nearby islands.
Harriette Tubman was active here in Beaufort. She was involved in a battle and she was brought south to help the new freed slaves integrate into paid work.
The U.S. soldiers set up a system to educate and pay these former slaves, and the system created became a template for the transformation from slavery to freedom for other areas after the war. After the war, the area was the first in the U.S. to have a racially integrated government.
Louise being super-cool.
Check out the motor on this dingy. The guy has mated an old outboard lower unit with a lawn mower engine.
Lots of old ships anchors here, some of them are so rusty they look like they will fall apart.
Giant boots for taking nerdy tourist photos.
The waterfront is a really well-kept part kere. One interesting twist was to make all the park benches into swings.
Has been a long time since I saw one of these in the wild. No road salt so cars last longer.
Beaufort arsenal. Amazing how small these old military installations are. The ceilings are all very low as people back in the day were, on average, smaller than they are today.
Courtyard of the arsenal. These cannons have a caliber of just 3 inches, and were made around 1850. Amazing how much technology has advanced over the last 180 years or so.
Last fall, coming down the rivers, I noticed an oil leak on our main engine. The leak was not large, a few hundred mL every few hundred hours, but it was a leak and so no bueno. It took me a while to trace the source of the leak, but I eventually ran it down to the raw water pump. This pump is gear driven and lubricated by engine oil. There were two possible sources of the leak, a gasket and an internal seal. Based on where the oil was coming from, it was not possible to narrow it down further than that. Since the pump was 20 years old, I decided to change it out, together with the gasket at the same time. I did not have the tools to change an internal seal, and it was easy to source a replacement remanufactured pump. Also, if the seal had failed, best to replace the pump just in case as preventative maintenance.
One nice about having a Cat engine is that it is easy to get parts. There are Cat dealers everywhere, and since these engines are used on all kinds of heavy equipment, parts are always in stock. As well, Cat offers re-manufactured parts. They take an old part like a pump, re-machine it and replace the bearings, seals and other small parts and you get a used part that is like a new part.
When we were in Jacksonville, I ordered a new pump together with all the gaskets and O-rings needed to re-install it (Cat uses O-rings for most seals - nice) and spent a day replacing the old pump. This required removing the pump from the engine, and taking it to the Cat dealer. When you by a re-man part, you get a discount on the part when you return the old one (core). Well, it turned out that the old pump had a gear on it, while the new one did not. We had to remove the gear from the old one and transfer it over. Luckily we went to a super user-friendly dealer (RingPower). They arranged for one of their machinists to transfer the gear over.
The old pump with the gear still attached. Lucky for us the local Cat dealer had a large machine shop, and they swapped out the gear for us onto the new pump.
The new pump went smoothly into place, the only difficulty was the weight - diesel parts are HEAVY. The pump has been run for about 50 hours now with no oil leak. Nice.
BIG tidal swing here (8 feet). This is the approach ramp to the dock at high tide.
Same approach ramp at low tide. The angle goes from a gentle slope to almost 45 degrees.
Our second day in Beaufort was a weather day. Although it was sunny all day long, it was also very windy. The wind was pretty gusty, with a steady 30 kmph "baseline", and so we had whitecaps in the harbour. The fenders got a workout until the direction shifted to be more on the nose. We went for another walk around town in the afternoon, then returned to the boat to nap.
Too true!
Small outfitters store that specialized in fly fishing. They had racks of different flies.
They use sea shells as aggregate in some of the concrete here.
Go on a horse and buggy ride at your own risk!
Around sunset the wind died out and, after supper, we played Mexican train dominoes with Chris and Julie. Our first time playing this game, and we all ran out of table space for the domino trains so had to bridge over in a few spots.
The winds completely died out during our third day in Beaufort, so I took the opportunity to wash the canvas. When the boat was stored in the yard, we picked up a lot of dust on the canvas. The best way to wash it is to remove each piece and wash it flat on the top stern deck. This can only be done in light winds, and today was the perfect day to do it.
After cleaning the canvas I celebrated with a nap.
That evening we hosted docktails beside iFloat, with the crews of Stulie (Chris and Julie) ; Sunset Seeker (Ed and Carole) and Amberina (James and Anisa), who were new loopers, only 4 days into their journey, so this was their first docktails.
Sunset on the docks.
The next morning the water was flat calm as we left the dock together with Stulie. We arrived at our anchorage at Edisto creek around noon and got set in. We had the place completely to ourselves, no boat traffic whatsoever. That afternoon we held a planning session to book our next leg of marinas. This can be a somewhat frustrating experience, as marinas do not always answer their phones, they never post prices on their websites, and the dock-booking apps only let you try one booking at a time. Eventually however, we managed to plan our next week of travel and get the necessary bookings. That evening, we played dominoes again.
In the game you have to connect dominoes in long "trains". Boats have limited space, so we quickly ran out of it on the table and had to go to zig-zag formations.
Early the next morning we set off for Charleston. Our marinas had requested we try to time our arrival for slack tide (when the current stops) so we had to make sure to leave the anchorage on time. As usual the anchor was stuck in the thick mud, but it eventually came out and off we went.
Eagle hanging out in a dead tree.
The morning started out with no wind whatsoever, but as we approached Charleston of course the winds picked up. We arrived in a stiff headwind, and so docking took some extra time, but we got set in the slip without incident and tied up.
Big tourist market on Market street. The old market building has been turned into a tourist trap. It is four blocks long.
After lunch, we took our scooters into Charleston and walked down Market street to see the tourist sights. We then went along Bay street, through the super-high-rent district to visit the museums at the Exchange and the old slave market. The Exchange was originally built on the sea wall, but now is several hundred yards from the water. Over the centuries, this area has been a kind of garbage dump for ship's ballast and also for household stuff. This has created lots of man-made land so now the Exchange is several hundred meters inland. This building was the first location for municipal offices and held things like the sheriff's office and tax collector's office. After the revolutionary war, this place became a jail known as the dungeon. We took a tour of the dungeon, which was basically a large communal space for prisoners. One of the key ways they used to prevent escapes was through malnutrition. Weak prisoners could not run away. The Exchange was also where the Declaration of Independence was ratified for South Carolina. George Washington walked the same floors we did.
Dungeon under the exchange. It was actually just a big basement, but was called the dungeon because of the horrific conditions that were there in the early 1800's.
After the exchange we went to the old slave market. This was an interesting experience. It was packed with people, but was totally silent, like a library or a church. The displays were pretty explicit, and showed many of the horrors associated with slavery.
The next morning, we walked to the local grocery store for provisions. Coming out of the store we saw a large protest along one of the river parkways. This was part of a large protest called 50501, and was a call for the observance of the rule of law.
Bunch of little fish on the dock. There are herons here that fish from the dock. One must have stashed his dinner and been scared away?
Back on the boat, we did a few boat chores. I installed a second USB outlet on the flybridge and also worked on the upper tach. It has been reading erratically lately. A few days ago I tightened the contacts, but this only gave a temporary fix. This time I took each connection apart and cleaned each contact with emory paper.
With that finished, Bruce and Sandy arrived for a visit. They had driven down from their house near Charlotte, and took us out to lunch at a place they knew called Red's Ice House.
St Michaels church in downtown Charleston.
Later we went to the Battery, which is an old fort on the waterfront in an uber-high-rent area. The homes nearby were from another world! Lots of money here.
Bruce and I at the Charleston battery.
Selfie with Bruce and Sandy. They visited with us on the boat briefly after we saw the town, then they had to get home.
Rainbow Row - houses on Bay street. Each house it a different colour. The bolts on the pink house were added to stabilize the structure against earthquakes and hurricanes.
Houses here are built long and narrow as the property tax used to be based on street frontage.
Its a Jeep thing.
The next morning we did a few small boat chores, then took an Uber to the Patriot's Point museum. The USS Yorktown and USS Laffey are docked here (WWII aircraft carrier and destroyer). We spent quite a bit of time talking with one of the volunteers at the Yorktown, who it turned out, used to be a pharmacology prof. in Philadelphia. He had also served on the New Jersey, and was able to tell us lots of interesting history about the ships here. We then set off on the self-guided tours (there are four), which take you through pretty much all areas of the Yorktown. The boat is big, but not as big as we were expecting. Apparently a WWII aircraft carrier was much smaller than a modern one.
View of the Yorktown from the pier.
Arresting gear. When a plane lands on the carrier, a tailhook on the plane grabs a "wire" (1.5 inch thick steel cable) which then slows the plane to a stop. It does this by expending the energy into this machine, which is a big oil-filled piston connected by sheaves to the arresting cable. The piston is about 50 feet long.
Example of a Mitchel bomber of the type used for the Doolittle raid.
Navy recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
Bunks in the chief's quarters. They had similar bunks in the enlisted section that were stacked 3 high.
Engine controls in the carrier.
Aircraft launched torpedo. This thing was only about 6 feet long, had to be small enough for a plane to carry it.
They had a bunch of jets on display on the flight deck. All the WWII aircraft were in the hangar deck.
The ladders that you had to use to go between decks were really steep and narrow.
Valves near the engine room turbines. The ship was powered by a boiler which fed a steam turbine. This fed some reduction gears which turned the prop shaft. The prop shaft was 2 feet in diameter!
Vulture's row. This is where sailors go to watch aircraft landing on the carrier.
The Laffey carried an anti-submarine drone from the 1960's. The QH-50.
We got to see the engine rooms, arresting gear and catapult systems, in addition to the various spaces for the crew. In the hangar deck, they had examples of the various types of planes used on the carrier throughout its lifetime, which began in 1943 (this boat was the replacement for the Yorktown that was sunk at Midway) and ended in the 1970.
We had lunch in a seafood place near the restaurant. They were serving a special Easter menu, so we got hosed on the price, but it was really tasty and cool view.
Back on the boat, we both grabbed some nap time after having walked through both ships.
Boat name of the day: Phuket
