Savannah to Beaufort, SC to Charleston, SC

Like many cars these days, boats also have GPS systems. They are a great aide to navigation but you always want to have the the back up of official charts to be able to confirm where you’re going just in case the little electronic gizmos don’t work like they should. It’s not like a car if you get lost. You could easily wind up on a sand bar or worse.

To make it more exciting, I have found that when one thing goes wrong, there are two or three other things that go wrong at the same time. Case in point: We were about 5 miles from our destination of Beaufort, NC when I saw on the GPS that the screen would not register our channel markers to make sure we were heading in the right direction. We were actually in open waters going across Port Royal Sound, a wide expanse of water at the end of a river just before it empties into the ocean. At about the same time, the waves began to pick up as we moved into less protected waters. Our boat is very seaworthy but it can pitch considerably when going into the trough of the large waves. Things started flying off the tables and shelves as we were trying to make our way into safer waters while not running aground. Marlene took a Meclazine while we were both trying to read the charts. I should have been more prepared to read them. As it turned out, we made it fine. I later discovered that it was my error on the GPS (I had it zoomed out too far).

Beaufort is a quaint little coastal town but we used it mainly as a stopover to get to Charleston the next day. The Beaufort – Charleston leg was about 75 miles in all. But we made it by 3:00pm in time to begin our tour of this town rich in history and tradition. More on Charleston in our next posting.