Chugging southward.....

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Greetings from southern, coastal South Carolina!!  (scenic Steamboat Landing)

Thug monitoring the navigation systems

We hope everyone is staying warm and having a great start to the New Year!  We are continuing to plod southward, slowly but surely.  Since my last blog, we left Beaufort, NC and made it to Carolina Beach, NC on Sunday.  We travelled through the areas hit hard by Hurricane Florence (at least the coastal areas where it made landfall).  Lots of signs of damage still (tarped roofs, half-sunk boats, and wonky docks).  We could even make out the surge waterline in places due to the water marks, which looked to be at least halfway up the first floor in some of the homes along the waterway.  The area seems to be doing an amazing job of rebuilding and moving on!  Here are some pictures from Carolina Beach:

Beautiful clouds!

Carolina Beach, NC

Headed to shore in the dingy

On Monday, we made a brief stop in Murrells Inlet, SC at Osprey Marina (awesome marina, BTW) to visit with my parents for the evening (shout out to Grandma J and Grandpa D - who are avid blog readers LOL).  We watched the College Football Championship game and had pizza - doesn’t get much better than than, especially considering how the game went!!!  Go Tigers!  

But warmer weather is calling, so we have kept Oceanus moving southward.  Since leaving the Myrtle Beach area, we have made two subsequent stops in very similar, isolated, marshy areas.  (the first was the South Santee River and tonight we’re in the Steamboat Landing River.)  We were able to stretch our legs a bit tonight - it definitely looks like South Carolina here!

Calm, South Carolina waters

Thug rocking his new sweater. 
They only had "girl" colors left at the store, but Thug is comfortable with his masculinity.

LOW tide!

Road at Steamboat Landing dock - beautiful area

All systems have been working well, with the exception of the autopilot, which apparently has an intermittent glitch which makes it randomly to either work perfectly or not work at all.  Mark cleaned off the connections on both ends of the autopilot controllers, but unfortunately it didn’t fix the problem - he contacted the manufacturer and will see what they recommend.  It is noted that he had already sent all of the autopilot components to the West Coast this fall to be serviced, so the problem could possibly be in the lines connecting the components???  Hopefully Mark can sleuth out the gremlins before long…..

Thug and I continue to be happy passengers, and we’re both still working on our napping skills.  Southbound we continue - until next time, friends!

: )  Mark, Sheryl and Thug  

Book count:

Mark - 0 

Sheryl - 2