FRIDAY MAY 14TH

Our daughter, Krista, finishes school today.  Only a few weeks after she turned 5 years old I watched her climb on to the school bus with her older brother, John. Away she went. She has been a student ever since. So after 20 years of hard work and determination, today she finished her classes at William Mitchell College of Law. We are very proud of her to say the least!!!!

We started our day by biking in to Georgetown for breakfast at Thomas Café. Less than an hour later we were peddling back to the boat with tummies full of grits and biscuits. And we were off to Osprey Marina. Located a few miles south of Myrtle Beach. 

The scenery has changed again. No longer salt marsh, but back to cypress swamp. Osprey everywhere we look. We travelled the Waccama River. It looks very much like the St. Johns River. Looking at the cypress swamps makes us understand what a monumental task it must have been to clear those areas out and build a dirt dike around them to create rice paddies. 

The water of late is much different from Savannah. It is dark brown in color and the tide is only around 2 ½ feet. We are a distance from any outlets to the ocean, which probably affects the tides and the salinity of the water. When we have been bombing around in the dinghy, Ross will dip his fingers in the water and taste it. (blue job!!) He says it is only a slight bit salty. We no longer hear krill under the boat but see many more turtles. We saw this snake in the water near our boat at the marina. From what I could figure out on the Internet, it is not a cottonmouth. I think it is a non-venomous snake called a Banded Watersnake. It was busy fishing when I took the photo. Poisonous or no, I left it to its fishing. 

We stopped for the night at Osprey Marina. It is somewhere around 10 miles south of Myrtle Beach and out in the middle of nowhere. Good depth coming in and extremely helpful staff. It had one of the cleanest laundries and showers I believe we have encountered so far on the trip. They gave us a welcome bag full of stuff, including a brick of cheese, crackers, mints, Honey Buns rolls, an emergency whistle, floating key ring, can koozie and the usual assorted flyers. 

Ross cleaned some of the boat fenders off today. They were grossly grungy along the bottoms because someone (and she will remain nameless) had them adjusted too low and they sat in the water for three weeks while we went home. They look great now after he scrubbed them with Softscrub!

One of the flyers in our welcome bag was for an Italian restaurant called Scatori’s. They offered complimentary transportation. Works for us! Had a wonderful meal there. Started off with an order of calamari with remoulade sauce. Very tasty. We came home with enough leftovers from dinner for another meal.