Leaving Georgetown on June 9

Saturday, June 9 Well, it was a lovely day in Georgetown. It was calm and sunny. Not any breeze in sight. A perfect motorboat day, so LUX will do her cruiser imitation. Terry took off for the airport, and we took off for the ICW. Terry had to get back into the grind,so we sent him off in a taxi-in style, by the way. It was a black Cadillac. Before we left, Carol and I made one more foray into town. We went to the local seafood market where I bought jumbo shrimp fresh off the boat for $8 a pound. Yes, you read that correctly. I also bought the special of the day- their own crab and shrimp dip. Dinner tonight should be quite the great treat. It was a neat experience in that the market was actually the warehouse where the shrimp boats dock and unload their haul. And did they ever have fresh. The market has a clean sea air smell, which tells you that the stuff inside really is fresh. I had to buy my stuff and get out of there quickly- before I gave in to the temptation to buy more seafood than we could store. So now we enter the exciting part of the day. As my readers may know, parts of the ICW have shoaled in. Mike found one of those spots around 1:30. We scraped along, turned around, and went the other way around that spot. Then we began the excitement of the double bridges. One is the tall one which we have to pass under just right to keep from removing parts of our mast. At this moment, Mike is going at zero knots. At least it feels that way as he tries to gracefully dance his way under the bridge. Magnificent work! He did it again. And now we await the motion of the swing bridge. That requires us to dance back and forth in an area only about 6 to 8 times the length of LUX. Luckily, the bridge opens on demand. Unfortunately, it takes a while to get a swing bridge open. It's 2:46 in the afternoon, and the fun just keeps coming. It is now 6:30. We made it to the Myrtle Beach Yacht Club. That was after we passed under at least a million more fixed bridges. Okay, I exaggerate. Today, we went under nine fixed bridges and by three swing bridges. Let me remind you that all the fixed bridges are supposed to be 65 feet - exactly what we need. So EACH one of those bridges required a long slow dance to make sure we made it through. And, we had to fight our way through an absolute pestilence of jet skis. Every time we turned around, there were more of them buzzing us. Then, we also had the regular Saturday crowd of runabouts. Throw into that some nice cabin cruisers, and you have a churning channel of water. We would have to wait until the bridge area was clear so that Mike could negotiate the passage under the bridge with no wake under the bridge. Note to self: Do not do ICW on a Saturday if you have a choice. Also, keep watch for those people who insist on pulling kids on inflatables. Not many of these people appear to have taken many courses from USPS. Especially the person who lost the child off the inflatable in the middle of the ICW in front of us. Also, there seems to be a reading problem. No wake appears to be really difficult to understand. That was the worst at the fixed bridges. The boats would roar right past us. A mile after the last bridge, we pulled into a dredged basin of the Myrtle Bridge Yacht Club. We are tied up to the last t pier available. Mike is cooking our wonderful shrimp. Peggy and Jacob are about to make a green salad. Jacob is in trouble, by the way. His back is very red. And that would not be from lashings from the captain. Too much sun for our youngest crew member.