Myrtle Beach

6/29/07 – I slept in this morning longer than I normally do. The sun usually wakes me up when it rises but I was too tired to notice this morning. I ate a breakfast of powdered sugar donuts and weighed anchor. It was high tide again so the cypress swamps looked far different than they did when I dropped anchor the day before. I motored through the cypress swamps for about two hours and saw some interesting things, including a sunken boat and some strange buildings built on barges. The remainder of the morning and much of the afternoon was spent in a narrow canal that passed Myrtle Beach. I lost count of the number of golf courses that I passed. There was an eighteen mile stretch of canal called “the rockpile” because there are many rock ledges that extend out from the banks but are submerged at high tide. This means that you need to stay in the center of the channel even if it appears that you would be safe venturing out to the edges to pass someone. The notes on my charts warn that, “Mariners should use extreme caution to avoid grounding in this area.” When the tide came down, I saw the exposed ledges and how menacing they would be if I were to hit them. The timing worked out perfectly today so that I had a favorable current for nearly the entire time that I was under way.

As I came to a spot that I had found on the chart to anchor, I found that two boats had already taken the spot, one sailboat and one small runabout. I went to a nearby spot that looked pretty good but found that it had shoaled since my chart was published in 2001 so I came back to find that the two ladies on the runabout decided to leave and were beginning to pull in the anchor line. I figured that I could swipe the spot as soon as they left so I quickly motored up there. One of the ladies was old and very fat and the other was younger and skinny. It quickly became apparent that neither of them knew what they were doing. They took turns motoring the little boat up so it was right on top of the anchor and trying to pull up. As the boat drifted over the anchor, they couldn’t hold the line any more so they had to let it go. They did this over and over again so I temporarily dropped my hook about two hundred feet from them to wait for the spot to open up. They continued to do this for nearly twenty minutes. I was just out of shouting distance so I couldn’t tell them to cleat the anchor line off as short as they could get it and back into it with the motor. This would have solved their problem in less then a minute. I just stood on the bow of my boat and chuckled while they wrestled with it until they finally got it up. I lifted my anchor (without any trouble) and motored over to take their spot. Then I went for a nice long swim. I had a big pasta dinner and did some reading before going to bed.