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
Today we are headed to Melbourne….not Australia. Before this trip I didn’t know there was a Melbourne in Florida. It seems that wherever the English went they used place names from home. Makes for a very confusing world!
