knitting

A lot has happened in the week since I last posted here.  Mostly, I’ve been knitting!  I really want to wear my Ann Jacket for Thanksgiving, and with the cold front that is stalled here, I’ll need something wooly and warm to stave off hypothermia. (I’m on the front band now, which is 800 short rows of  20 stitches…but that’s still 800 rows and 16,000 stitches…. I’ve made peace with wearing the jacket as a vest for just this one day!)

We are in Savannah now, tied up to the main bulkhead right in the historic part of town which happens to be a very narrow part of the Savannah River.  When the huge ships go by there is a lot of rolling….and from dawn ’til dark they go by every few minutes.  I would never have guessed this would be such a busy port.

Before coming here yesterday, we spent a couple of days in Beaufort, South Carolina.  The spelling is exactly the same as Beaufort, North Carolina, and I’ve always gotten the two towns mixed up.  Now that I’ve actually visited both of them, I think I will forever keep them straight!  Both are lovely towns, but I enjoyed Beaufort, in South Carolina (pronounced like Be-yoo-frt), slightly more than Beaufort, North Carolina (which is pronounced like Bow-frt, as in tying a bow).  Perhaps it was because we were there for a particularly moving Veterans’ Day Parade.

… perhaps it was because we took a walk through an amazing historical part of town with houses that are so elegant they’ve been used in numerous movies, like “The Big Chill,”  “The Great Santini” and “Prince of Tides.”  Supposedly both Tom Berenger and Pat Conroy live nearby.

Perhaps it was because I stumbled on a knitting store!  And what an inviting, friendly shop it was!

How often does you walk into a knitting shop and see a knitted sweater that you simply cannot resist?  It doesn’t happen very often for me, but it happened here.

This is the “Ruffle Wrap Cardigan” by Cheryl Murray from the Fall 2012 issue of “Vogue Knitting.” The collar and cuffs in this sweater are knit with the wide ribbon that has holes punched in it for inserting the knitting needle.  I’ve been seeing this ribbon at yarn stores recently and wanting to try it!  This is such a pretty pattern for trying it out!  But….no starting until I have my Ann Jacket finished!

There are so many wonderful things that have happened in the last week.  The sights here are decidedly more southern.  Lots and lots of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss and softened by resurrection ferns.  The cypress have given way to more deciduous trees, but there is still sweetgrass for as far as you can see.  This area has so much water.  The charts we use for navigating are beautiful for all the winding creeks, rivers, estuaries…

And here’s the flotsam and jetsam bit…. into every adventure and journey some excitement must happen, right?  Well, we had our first excitement yesterday.  We had entered the Savannah River, and my, oh my!…it’s narrow!  There is a cold front stalled here bringing with it strong northeast winds which is pushing more water into the rivers and creeks so the tides are high, and the Savannah River is full of debris.  I was steering, watching and attempting to avoid large black plastic bags, large tree limbs that were somewhat submerged from being water logged. Ships were passing us!  Ships so big that they were longer than the river is wide.  And wouldn’t you know, as I was passing between something that look like the entire top of a tree and another something that looked like a big black garbage bag the engine coughed, the boat shuddered and lots of black smoke came out the exhaust.  I put the engine in neutral and Bob came running!  We were powerless!

There was a huge ship bearing down on us, and we had just enough forward momentum to get to the side of the channel.   Two tug boats came out to assist, and we later discovered that they were talking to the ship on channel 13, saying that they would just push us out of the way if we became a problem! New friends on a sailboat just ahead of us turned back to help us.  They came alongside, we rafted together, and they delivered us to the town dock!  It was dicey.  There was a long moment when I seriously entertained the notion of being run down by a ship.

Later, when we were safely docked and Bob was preparing to dive under the boat to see what was caught on our propeller, he got this photo.  It’s a different ship, but all the ships coming up the Savannah River are about this size….quite a contrast to the pretty schooner!

It’s November 15, and we hit our two-month point onboard on Veterans’ Day.  I’ve now been onboard Pandora longer than any previous trip.  And I certainly have more miles under my keel than ever before.

Day 63 and 64, Nov. 14 and 15: Savannah, Georgia

 

North Carolina has been a lovely place to visit!  We’ve seen the first palm trees of the trip, although I doubt they are native.  They look transplanted, but have adapted well to the climate.

There are flocks and flocks of pelicans!  People here must take them for granted as such a common sight, but I find them so exotic!  Yesterday Bob saw one sitting in the water, with the sun striking him just so that he could see the silhouette of the fish inside his bill!  A great big fish….just like the limerick!

Couldn’t count them all!

Almost every inlet we’ve passed going down the coast has brought in dolphins who play at the side of the boat.  One dolphin kept leaping out of the water right beside me while I was at the helm.  He (she?) kept switching from one side of the aft quarter to the other, and I kept flinging myself from side to side hoping to photograph him in mid air!  At one point he cleared his blow hole and shot water in our cockpit!  He was so close….but I did not get the photo!  I did manage to run aground….. new rule: the helmsman must stay focused, no taking photos while driving!

What a lovely soft landscape down here.  All low country, with pearly white sand beaches, beautiful marsh grasses that are a brilliant gold/green in the sunlight….just like the amber waves of gold in the Midwest!  Only these fields of gold are cut through with shimmering estuaries in an amazing color of bright turquoise.  When I look straight down at the water next to the boat it is a wonderful shade of sea green.  When I look out across the water, or into the winding veins of the estuaries, it is blue-green.  Lovely.  And there has been sunshine all week.

We’ve seen lots of Long Leaf Pines, the wood that Bob used to make my first loom 36 years ago.  We’ve seen flocks of egrets sitting in trees like big white pillows.  The fish are jumping everywhere, which makes us think there are dolphins chasing them.  Certainly the hunting is very good for the bird life.  There are so many birds.  I realized that some of the egrets I saw are really ibis. How cool!

And speaking of birds…. North Carolina is chock full of man-made birds too!  We have been inundated by military aircraft in these waters.  At Camp LeJeune I saw two Ospreys flying in formation for about an hour.  Quite impressive.  We’ve seen more of those huge troop carrying helicopters than we can count!  We hear them coming long before we see them!

We are in Southport, North Carolina, today.  This is a quintessential lovely southern town.  Big wide boulevards, gigantic live oaks (draped in epiphytic ferns called “resurrection ferns”) shading the sidewalks, lovely historic houses dating from the early 19th century.  Many of the houses have huge upper floor porches for looking out at Cape Fear.  That inlet is a scary piece of water, as its name implies!

Oh, how I’d love to sit on this porch with an iced tea!

We need to get away from here pretty soon due to hurricane Sandy, which will be arriving in the Bahamas in the next day or so.  We’ll continue down the coast into South Carolina, only a few miles further.  From there the ICW heads inland, and that should give us good protection from the coming storm.

I always check each port we visit to see if there is a knitting store.  There is one in Southport, so mark your map if you travel this way!  It is called Angelwing Needle Arts and carries embroidery and quilting fabrics as well as knitting yarns.  It is a pretty shop with lots of temptations. I’m sorry to report that I did not find them as friendly as Frivolous Fibers in St. Michael’s, Maryland….but hey…that’s what makes Frivolous Fibers so memorable!

As I wrote this Bob took a walk and has returned with a pound of large shrimp fresh off the boat!  They still have their heads!  $5.00/lb….for that price we can clean them ourselves.  Should make a great shrimp cocktail

Day 42, October 22: anchored in Mile Hammock at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina
Day 43, October 23: on mooring in Carolina Beach, North Carolina
Day 44, October 24: docked at “Fishy Fishy” Restaurant inSouthport, North Carolina (Cape Fear inlet)

 

What a place!  A quaint town with lovely houses dating from late 18th through the 19th centuries, on a beautiful piece of waterfront, where pelicans and dolphins play the waters, and wild horses graze just across the harbor on a bit of salt marsh!  It’s simply amazing!

This egret was hunting the marshes right next to the horses.

We have heard that at nearby Cape Look Out there is a good possibility of seeing loggerhead turtles, so we hope to go there today for a walk on the beach and turtle viewing!  Our plans may change though because the weather report this morning (marine forecast by Chris Parker via sideband radio) was all about the possibility of latest storm ‘Sandy’ coming up the east coast.  Parker’s recommendation is for everyone to use the next couple of days to get as far south as possible.

So we may just get underway….

I did block the ‘wingspan’ shawl a coupld of days ago….