Month: January 2018

Standing in the dinghy looking at my (James’) frozen hands, trying to will them to work! …my hands wouldn’t work and I could feel the rest of me shutting down, starting with my version of reality, and hypothermia was, of course, the last thing on my mind. I somehow managed to get out of the little boat and back aboard Nomad in a completely blacked out state, where I, what(!), came to, when I could feel my hands again holding the warm vent-output of the heater. I told her through hyperventilated breaths that this is a change in my life happening in realtime. We talked, we hugged. When I (Dena) cried, he took it like a gift, like something better than forgiveness. Togetherness is better than forgiveness. We weren’t okay. We were faltering from the poison of South Carolina’s 3rd-world water and the poison of the mold drip dripping on our heads as we slept and the sapping weakness of night after night of temperatures under 25 degrees Fahrenheit and days underway at 26. Both of us, weakened, taxed beyond coping, beyond just-get-through-this, turned to each other and said, enough. This is the change. Southing ain’t it… We sailed south to Latitude 18 on the Big Island and South wasn’t the answer then and it isn’t now. The change is: a new boat, or rather, another boat, yeah… Sailing North out of Chuck-ton just to get (the fuck) out of that trap, that trump-confederate stronghold, that town, and then we ran aground, ugh…in the marina, a marina (!!!), wow, I have no idea where-the-fuck-I-was, oh yeah Isle of Palms, S.C., right, powered a trench in the sandy bottom, then we epic-walked to pizza… We did a short offshore from Isle of Palms to the North Edisto River because we didn’t[…]

Read more

Watching the forecast, we knew we were in for some cold days and precipitation. When we left Cow House Cove and the schooner SteelAway, we were heading for, as usual on this trip, more propane. The schooner Escargot, heading north up the Waccamaw River, provided some mild confusion. I (Dena) mean really, why go north when the weather says snow? That day took us through the pulp-mill smell of Georgetown on the ebb and through the shallows between there and the South Santee River at low tide. The water was almost blood-red with billowing plumes of thick silty-mud reminding us to do some preventative maintenance in the morning, such as cleaning the raw-water-intake. We had plenty of swing room in that anchorage, but those trees were our only “protection”. The current ran counter to the wind all night but turned around for us in the morning giving us disconcerting speed coming out of the river and back into the Ditch. We emptied our heater’s propane tank and hooked up the spare exchange tank we’d gotten a couple days before in Myrtle Beach. Nighttime temps in the low 20’s, and stiff bitter winds in the face during the day made the next stage rather uncomfortable, meaning, half hour watches and it still seemed too long. McClellandsville showed us some great simple foods (and an especially delicious tartar sauce) but they had nothing else for us. No one to fill our propane tanks…even both locations with propane exchanges were out of full tanks. Guess everyone was prepping for bad weather. We left Leland Oil Company early enough to have the high tide for the worst of the nearby shallows on the ICW, but that put us in another shoal zone further down the line just after low tide. If it weren’t for[…]

Read more