The Great Loop: Are We Having Fun Yet?

Are we having fun yet?   Yes …….  and no …..  but mostly YES!

Over the past couple of weeks, we find ourselves adapting to our new lifestyle. As often happens, the “dream” of cruising The Great Loop can sometimes overshadow the “reality” of cruising The Great Loop. Beginning Loopers (like us) often lament various things that are different than their expectations.  Lots of fun times, some not so much.

Coming in & out of marinas is getting less stressful as we gain experience.  Boat issues are to be expected whether the boat is brand new or 10 years old & thankfully ours have been limited.  We didn’t anticipate the amount of time we’d spend on navigation planning, timing tides & currents.  But it’s getting quicker.

In the meantime, we’ve journeyed another 150 miles on our Loop – between hiding from spring thunderstorms and spending time exploring, that’s about our weekly average.

Optimystique’s Loop is now up to 832 miles … only a drop in the bucket of the 5,200 yet to come, but still a good start.

We may need to slow down … spring is a bit reluctant to come to the East Coast and David’s not getting to wear his shorts as often as he’d prefer. Timing The Great Loop is trickier than we anticipated.

We’re loving BORING days on the ICW…. the Low Country Carolinas scenery is absolutely beautiful … especially at anchor early in the morning or late almost sunset evening…

And we’re loving the history and ambiance of the Carolina Low Country.  We’ve visited Beaufort SC,  Isle of Palms (Charleston),  and now Georgetown.  At Isle of Palms, Enterprise picked us up (and returned us to the marina) and we toured the side of Charleston we hadn’t explored before – Boone Hall Plantation and the USS Yorktown at Patriot’s Point.

TIP:  We discovered that we could get a rental car for a day and tour everywhere we could fit into 7 hours for LESS money that it would have been to Uber/Lyft to one place and back (including tips for the Lyft driver).  Plus Enterprise picked us up and returned us to the marina.  WIN WIN!!!

While the house is the 4th on the property and only dates to 1936, the slave cabins and the cotton gin building are original to prior to the Civil War.  The Gullah presentation on African culture in America was very educational.

Interestingly enough, this plantation was not known as much for its cotton as its BRICKS!  Everything brickmakers could want are in the backyeard – sand, water, red clay just a couple feet down.  They made bricks for Fort Sumter, bricks for all the hoity toity homes in downtown Charleston and bricks for the plantation.  In all, they were making 4 million bricks a year by the time of the Civil War.  Unfortunately after the Civil War they couldn’t find labor – any labor – to continue making bricks.

After our morning at the Boone Hall Plantation (we could have easily spent all day) we moved on to the USS Yorktown and Patriot’s Point complex.

But the USS Laffey, a WWII era Destroyer stole the show.

Known as the “Ship That Would Not Die”, in WWII, the USS Laffey was struck by 22 Japanese aircraft, some Kamikaze and some conventional.  The best part? The forward gun turret that you can see in the photo has a realistic presentation inside demonstrating what it must have felt like to be the 14 crewmen inside that turret during the attack.  Flashing lights, deafening noise and total chaos accompanied the video. Of the 14 crewmen inside, 8 died in the attack.

Moving on to Georgetown SC, our first impressions are that everything in this town is OLD … circa mid-1700’s.  George Washington visited here during the Revolutionary War.  There were more Revolutionary War battles fought in South Carolina than any other state — 0ver 200.  I had no idea!

We endured a COLD windy day (50 degrees & we saw 40 on the anemometer but you have to subtract 8 because that’s how fast we were going … still gusting over 30 on the nose). Driving from the lower helm kept us inside, warm and protected from the wind and spray. The visibility isn’t as good down below, but the benefits made up for the visibility on this day!

In Georgetown, we discovered there’s a CVS a mile away from Harbortown Marina, so our mission was to get David’s prescription for cholesterol meds transferred and refilled.  CVS (or Walgreens) make it easy to get meds wherever you happen to be on The Great Loop.

Now we’re ready to head off early Sunday morning — we need to be safely inside Osprey Marina near Myrtle Beach by mid-day to hide from the next 2 1/2 days of nasty weather, wind & thunderstorms.  Off we go!!!

Cheers!  Jan & David, currently Harborwalk Marina, Georgetown, SC