A Day of Firsts
Preparing for departure this morning I made a last minute decision to drive from the lower helm. We’ve not done that to date but with wind blowing like stink (guessing it was steady 15 with gusts to 20?), low temps (50’s) and having to cross Charleston harbor we opted for warmth and comfort.
Using the lower helm has its challenges - I removed the helm seat so have to stand and don’t have chart plotter at lower helm. I typically have iPad their that connects to garmin and lets me use all functions of the mfd (multi function display), but not quite as easily. To complicate things, I’ve been using the iPad to run aquamaps, which provides USAC soundings giving far more information on depth than the garmin. I use the garmin for navigation and controlling the autopilot (I almost never steer). When at the lower helm I found that I didn’t have the same aquamaps info on phone, split screen on iPad was useless for garmin functions (screen too small). There really was no good setup for lower helm in this area. Therefore, once we’d slogged across Charleston harbor and headed into the next set of rivers and creeks we were happy to go back to the bridge. I’ll get a picture of the setup tomorrow.
We were excited today to reach mile marker 500 in the ICW (day 28 on the road) - but with cameras ready to grab the shot of the mile marker, much to our dismay, there was no marker! This was the best I could do to provide proof of progress:
Early in the day we hailed boat in front of us and requested a ‘slow pass’. During this maneuver we noticed that the boat was from Bristol, RI. We chatted briefly, I told them where we were headed.
Shortly after we anchored here at Fenwick Cut
Pelican, the boat from Bristol, joined us. We were invited to their boat for cocktails, so this is where our second First came - we used the dinghy for the first time on this trip!
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