Larry wrote:

"Armond Perretta" wrote in
:

Let's back up a bit. Didn't you just say one or two posts ago that
boats belong offshore? When did you change your position and admit
what I've been saying all along in this thread?



Our original conversation was dealing with "ICW Anchorage Listing", a trip
up (or down, depending on your reference I suppose) The Ditch. There are
parts of it that meander way around South of Charleston in fairly pristine
"Low Country", as the Chamber of Commerce prefers we call the SWAMPS we
call home. The basis was to TRAVEL, not enjoy at leisure, from Nawth to
Flo'da, as Yankees are inclined to do. This ends up in a boring line of
traffic worrying each other about contact. This isn't very pleasurable,
I've found, especially on the lower end of the trip where The Ditch really
IS a ditch, behind a beach, straight as a sewer pipe.

That's your interpretation of the ICW. Maybe I'm not a Yankee (and
I'm not sure that all the Canadians that do this route would
appreciate being called Yankees), but we didn't worry others about
contact (depending on what you meant by that). I got an email from a
friend saying that they were passed (they have a slow boat) by 175 to
200 people a day - we apparently don't travel at a peak time so we
didn't have that. We did tend to travel after the rush in the fall
and earlier in the spring than most people.

There are certain areas of the ICW that I don't like (notably the
Rockpile and while there's stuff to see, I don't particularly like the
area north of Wrightsville Beach) but most of it is just as you
described your trip up the Cooper River. The Waccamaw River and the
area south of Georgetown SC is really nice and so is the Indian River,
and the sounds of Georgia can be very relaxing (although Bob finds
them stressful because of the tides and also boring).

For this trip, just leave me offshore enjoying the pleasure of the waves
slapping the hull and throwing dinner on the deck, at times. Leave me to
my playful friends all trying to see who can jump over the bow spirit
without whacking a tail or who can do the most barrel rolls from stern to
bow in one sweep. Leave me out there in the pitch black after the moon
sets far enough offshore the light floods from the condos don't blank out
my fascination with Carl Sagan's "Billions and Billions" rolling in an odd
oval overhead as I lay in an open cockpit, anxiously waiting for that
inevitable flying fish to come upset my lazy reclination and scare the
bejesus out of me with his stinking flailing as he failed to clear the
other top of the cockpit gunwale, gasping for life. Bungee jumpers go
nothing on my adrenalin rush caused by being struck square in the temple by
a flying fish coming out of the blackness at 30 mph. You KNOW when you're
going to jump. The fish make the anticipation agonizing....especially if
your whole watch it never happens.

Then there was that awful whooshing sound of "something" surfacing 30 yards
to starboard you just couldn't see before it filled its blowhole and
returned to the depths under the keel. That awful feeling of complete
helplessness that doesn't go away, even when your watch is over.

AS for the trip upriver to anchor out in some deserted estuary mouth so far
away from the marked channel you see no blinking lights to spoil your
latest book chapter after a fine meal.....that's a different topic
altogether. To test which mode, you ask the question....Can I see any kind
of navigational marker from here indicating someone ELSE has been here in
the last, say, 20 years? No? Ah, this IS a great anchorage! Can you see
any evidence of human habitation spoiling your field of view? The Ditch is
lined with the decadence of our society. Where I was talking about, the
only evidence you may see is 200 years old, perhaps part of a wooden dam
used to flood a rice field by our ancestors or the hulk of an old boat or
building, partially eaten away by time and tide to complete the perfect
landscape you never need paint to remember it by. Unlike the TRAVEL trip,
this trip is really to nowhere special and we can simply throw overboard
any fool that spoils it for the rest of us by saying he/she has to be back
at the dock at some specific time to continue their quest for money or
fame.

God how I hate it when becalmed offshore and someone says we're never going
to "get there" in a timely fashion. If he needed to "get there", I wish
he'd said something before stepping aboard so we could arrange for his
plane ticket so he didn't spoil MY enjoyment of being totally becalmed
between moments of sheer terror as we surfed down that 12' roller wondering
if the storm jib was "too much sail" for these wind conditions and
wondering, aloud at times, how the hell we were going to haul it down
without ending up being dragged overboard......I need my rest!

Also a lot of the people in the ICW have power boats, and some of them
have sailboats that wouldn't be suitable for offshore.

grandma Rosalie