Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Ossabaw Island, GA
My “In-Laws,” Asheville, NC
I survived Thanksgiving . . . barely. We spent the week up in the mountains east of Asheville to celebrate the holiday with Vanessa’s father, Steve, and his wife, Dorothy. After careful thought, I’ve come to one conclusion: they are trying to kill me. Especially Dorothy. I don’t level this accusation without considerable evidence to back up my claim. I give them credit as they are very subtle in their modus operandi, but I am convinced they have funerary plans in mind for me.
At first, I didn’t catch on, as I took their gestures as overly generous. Then, the plan became clear. Here’s the way it would usually go. First, Steve comes at me, just before the lunchtime meal: “Hey, son, let’s open up this fine bottle of wine, he he he, ha ha, giggle giggle, chuckly chuckle.” How nice, a fine bottle of wine with my father-in-law, from his personal collection . . . until I realize, because of his recent stroke (or so he says), his consumption is limited to one small glass, while he continues to pour liberally into overly large glass for me. Having skipped breakfast, let me tell you, wine as part of my day’s first meal is a real wake up. However, being the son-IN-LAW, I certainly don’t want to be rude to my gracious host, so I drink my share (and apparently his) while trying not to sway at the counter or fall off my chair. Once he sees I’m well on my way to being desperately in need of food to help slow the progress of the wine, I hear him off in the corner giggling quietly as he pops another cork. It really doesn’t matter, as I’m already too inhibited to notice my glass is suddenly full again.
All this is child’s play, however, as the real heavy hitter of this team is about to step in: Dorothy. She is the real genius behind this killing conspiracy, as she gets up at 07:30 and begins the days assault on me, before quietly returning to sleep so she can casually awake when I get out of bed and pretend as if everything is normal, when, in fact, her plan to attack me from inside is well underway. Her weapon of choice? Food. Lots and lots of food. She claims to dislike cooking, yet starts first thing in the morning . . . for me. When Steve has finished with his first wave of the wine attack, Dorothy, knowing what I desperately need, steps up with a pot in one hand and a serving spoon in the other and starts piling some wonderful manner of animal fat by-product onto my plate.
“Eat up Tebes,” She says, calling me a progressing variation of my name — From Stephen to Steve to Stevie to Tebie to Tebes, where we are now – next time it will be something like Teber. By now, my wine soaked stomach is screaming for utterly delicious food, causing me to dive in and totally gorge myself, eating like a sailor who’s been castaway for months and just washed ashore for his first meal. The effects of the wine finally starting to subside, I notice for the first time, everyone is watching me stuff myself, except Vanessa who, currently too embarrassed by her marriage to me, keeps her attention focused down and never looks up from her own plate. Steve and Dorothy, however, are gleaming with pride.
“Done Tebes? Here. Have some more,” Mom cackles as she slings another heaping scoop of raw LDL cholesterol onto my plate. “Eat up!” I could feel my arteries starting to harden.
The real funny part of all of this is the cruising lifestyle had taken several of pounds off my belt line, as evidenced by the scale in the bathroom of my in-law’s house. After just a couple of days of holiday gluttony, I was right back to where I was before cruising. Man, that didn’t take long! These people are professionals! After a couple of days, I wondered if Dorothy thought I was a turkey and was stuffing me for the Thanksgiving dinner. I asked the question, “Are you trying to kill me with food?”
“Uh, well, uh, no Tebes, ah, I mean, well, I just love to cook for you. I mean, jeez, you eat everything! I just love it,” she replied.
“Well, okay,” I said, “but, what’s his excuse?”
“You’re just a stupid fool for drinking too much wine,” he replied, trying to put the blame on me. It sure was great being home for the holidays.
Beaufort, SC
But, who can sit around and eat non-stop for ever? We have a big issue looming: the status of our cruising kitty. After our engine replacement, our cruising kitty has remained skinny. Since entering the ICW, it has been down right anorexic. Now that we’ve spent a week off the boat and maintained all the associated charges with not using the boat our kitty is in a coma (isn’t it interesting that it costs more to NOT use the boat than it does to use it continuously?). Too bad we couldn’t have sent our cruising kitty to Steve and Dorothy for feeding, but it needs cash, not turkey and dressing. So we returned to the boat the day after Thanksgiving and planned an immediate Saturday morning departure for the Florida border. We are still making immediate departures everyday, as we just didn’t have it in us to make the open water, 130 mile direct passage.
We all came back from the mountains with colds or some form of flu, which makes traveling difficult. So, we decided to take it easy until we recover and abandoned our off-shore course. Saturday, late-early morning, we set out down the ICW and were happy about it. First of all, everyone is really gone and there are only a small handful of boats making the trip, so we have the whole ditch practically to ourselves. Second, the ICW south from Charleston is quite lovely. Unlike the barren sounds north of Charleston, this section has lots of trees and many little side channels to compliment its vast, grassy, low lands; making striking scenery. After two days, we leisurely sailed into Beaufort, SC (Pronounced as it is spelled, unlike the one up in North Carolina).
One of Many Beautiful Southern Homes
Beaufort is a very beautiful place. But, again, our cruising kitty is unconscious, so who has time to lounge around and stroll though town? We have to get to Florida! Ah, but there is a free town dock in Beaufort to entice us, so to town we went. Beaufort is a historic place where people with more money than sense built huge homes, as this town is full (I mean there are a lot of ’em) of old southern antebellum homes, complete with their wide porches and shade trees covered with spanish moss. It is really a place out of the past where they literally role up the side walks at 17:00. We arrived at 17:05! No problem. It ain’t costing us nothin’, so we spent the night. We walked though town, enjoyed the architecture, provisioned at the Piggly Wiggly, and fueled up at the town marina. We spent $98 in food, $125 in fuel, $7.25 for ice cream cones in town — the cruising kitty is dead.
An Inviting Porch in Beaufort
No matter, we are in the south and there’s no rush ’round these parts. It will all be just fine, as we have storage lockers full of food, tanks full of water, and fuel tanks full of diesel. We’ll just head out in the morning and make way for Florida. We made it all of 14 nautical miles to Hilton Head Island. Hilton Head is a place where modern day folks have more money than sense, the landscaping is too sterile for something as tawdry as spanish moss, there is no real “style”, never mind antebellum, and all the houses there are so big, apparently no one got the memo that “size really doesn’t matter” as every house is bigger than the one before it. With the size of the boats moored at some of these homes, we didn’t bother looking for a town dock, as I don’t think we would be welcome there, with a dead kitty and all. So, we anchored out and waited for the mornings weather to decide whether or not to make way for Florida again. The weather was neutral, so we decided to put off Florida for tomorrow and continued down the ICW.
Nereus in the Sunset in Beaufort, SC
And we are glad we did. Coming out of Wells Cut, we ran into a pod of Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins. Dolphins are so prevalent around here, I usually don’t make a big deal about them. Especially, since I yell below “Dolphins!,” and Binga usually fails to drop what she is doing and come to see. She usually comes up later, expecting them to still be there on her schedule. But this time, I yelled and she popped right up. We stood together on deck, watching, waiting. As she was pointing out towards shore, one came up out of the water right under her arm beside the boat! Her eyes popped right out of her head! What excitement! There were a pair of dolphins swimming in our bow wave. As Binga giggled, she screamed, as toddlers do when they laugh. This really peaked the curiosity of those dolphins, who swam along on their sides, so they could eye this little blond-haired creature staring and laughing back at them! They were just as curious about her as she was about them. After a solid four to five minutes, they dove below the water’s surface and were gone.
Big Skies Welcoming us to Georgia
Soon after our dolphin encounter, we crossed the Savannah River and logged another state to our log book, our tenth, if you count Delaware, which we technically never made landfall. Not that it matters. There is one state left – the last one.
We are now anchored in the middle of some little cove, somewhere in Georgia. Perhaps, tomorrow we will go outside and make our run for Florida, where we have to find jobs and return to real life and do things, like make money again. Fact is, we’ve made such good progress coming south in the past couple of months, pushing so hard, moving us closer and closer to the end, we want to stop. We don’t want it to end. Crossing that state line, a measly sixty-eight miles from here, represents the beginning of the end for us. While we know it is coming, we don’t want it to come so soon. Vanessa is especially worried. I figured, with her family there and all, she’d be ready to finish. That is not the case, as she has more anxiety than I and doesn’t want to stop. So instead of pushing gallantly to the finish, we’ve slowed down. It is probably the pace we should have been taking all along. Unfortunately, you push so hard at the beginning, worrying about the long distance, that when you’ve finally made it, you wish you hadn’t.
We will cross that border soon, this week for sure, and will then begin the long ending of this journey – the state of Florida. Until then, this Georgia place looks like a nice hang out. Perhaps I can spend more time ashore, see more sites, and check pay phones for loose change . . .
-Steve