At Church Creek Tom jockeyed the boat into just the right position, slid the control lever into neutral (he thought), and hot-footed it down the ladder to let out some anchor chain. When all the chain was out he started letting out the line, but the current seemed to be pushing us backward faster than usual. "Do you want me to put it in forward gear?" I called down. "No, it's OK," but a second later, when he tried to cleat the line and it skidded through his fingers, he yelled, "Yes! Put it in forward. Now!"  I did, (finding that it had been in reverse, not neutral) he managed to secure the line, and then held up his hands in agony. The escaping rope had taken a good deal of his skin with it, leaving his fingers bloody and stinging. He described it as "like grabbing the wrong end of a branding iron."

Sunday started out pleasant enough but that changed by one o'clock. We were in the Coosaw River coming up on Beaufort, South Carolina, when we came face to face with the leading edge of a cold front. In an instant, a driving rain pounded us and the zippered front window bowed in from the force of the wind. Visibility was nil. Water sprayed through each tiny opening around the zippers and dripped  onto us from the overhead framework. Tom kept close to a green marker until it let up enough that he could see. After the squall blew through, the scenery changed; a dark gray sky was backlit by the sun and the sky's reflection turned surface ripples into silver-color draped satin. I went below to get a dry jacket and when I came outside - Surprise! It handed us a one-two punch and started to dump on us again. Hard. At the same time a barge was coming our way up the channel. Tom's turn! We made it to Factory Creek in Beaufort and within three minutes the sun came out. 

(Oops! No pictures this time; I forgot to take any.)

You can tie onto the free dock at Downtown Landing next to the marina but they don't let youstay overnight. That's what we did on this bright cool Monday morning, just in time for a quick walk to Blackstone's for breakfast. 

One drawback to anchoring out day after day is a lack of exercise if you can't get off the boat. The closest grocery store to Downtown Landing is Piggly Wiggly, 2.3 miles according to mapquest, and it was a perfect day for a jog. On the way to the store I passed the visitor center, stopped in to look around, and picked up a flyer for the Jade Garden, a Chinese buffet. According to the address, it appeared to be about three blocks past Piggly Wiggly; that would put Tom in good spirits. I got back with the groceries and dropped the flyer on the table in front of him. He raised his eyebrows. "Oooh."

We got ready to go and walked down the dock, past the horses and carriages that park there between customers who come for carriage rides through historic Beaufort. Each time I walked by I was careful to step around the large yellow puddles where horses relieve themselves. Solid waste was always cleaned up right away but the air remained pungent. Jade Garden turned out to be not an extra three blocks beyond the grocery store, but more like an extra mile and a half. Numbers didn't change the way I expected, but the food was exceptionally good and we ate our fill before the long trek back. Back at the boat I took off my shoes, put a band-aid on my blister, and realized I'd hoofed about 13 miles that day, a half-marathon. No lack of exercise this time!

At 5:15 p.m. we started for Battery Creek, seven miles away, and the closer we got to our destination, the rougher the ride. A cold, 20-knot northwest wind blew straight down the creek. It was plain this plan was not going to work. Tom made a U-turn, steered back to where we'd started from, and dropped the anchor at the edge of the channel with barely a glimmer of daylight left. It felt good to be in my slippers and out of the biting wind. They said it would get down to 32 overnight. 

Next morning the stainless steel steering wheel was like wrapping my fingers around a curl of ice. We would have to go across six sounds in the next two days. Sound: a. A long, relatively wide body of water, larger than a strait or a channel, connecting larger bodies of water; b. A long, wide ocean inlet. Or, an irritating pain in the neck the chart makers invented to louse up a nice day. But in the end, none of them were too bad.   

Skipper Bob's anchorage book advises that in the state of Georgia the Army Corps of Engineers has no money for maintaining the Intracoastal Waterway. That's where we'll be tomorrow.