Pics of Winyah Bay (the I day I ran aground)

[Captain Smollett]

I wrote about our recent trip to Georgetown and Winyah Bay in another thread, but wanted to post some pics.

We tent-camped at Huntington Beach State Park.  The campground has 6 designated tent sites that are off the road and wooded:



The green Coleman 2-burner stove in the shot was brand-new for this trip; we finally had to retire the one my Dad had purchased before I was born as I spent more time keeping it running than actually cooking with it.  Sad to see it go, but (a) it saw a LOT of miles in its 40+ year life and (b) now my kids will have one that is included in their early memories.  :)

As mentioned before, Kurt was nice enough to provide detailed annotations on some charts for me.



The legend for his annotations had the red lines meaning "Danger, Will Robinson."  The black dot is where I dug the centerboard into the sand - right on top of that spoil (I was sailing what would be left-to-right on this chart).  This was after having the rudder kick up on me TWICE.  In my defense, I DID think the board was UP, but bottom line I should have been in the channel anyway.   :-[

(it's even worse than that....I told myself repeatedly before going down there that if I needed to get out of the channel, to stay on the NORTH side of it....oh well...best laid plans, and all of that).

(I got a really cool picture of the boat aground with my wife and daughter standing there, in the less-than-knee-deep-on-my-4 year-old water; but, alas, we don't like to post pictures of our daughter on the 'Net, so you'll just have to imagine WAVE FUNCTION beached in the MIDDLE of the Bay).

It took just under two hours to get the line under the hull to pull the board up; during that time, we were helped by about 2 inches of rising tide as well.  In any case, she swam at 14:45 and we were underway again.  While motoring the remaining 3 miles to North Island, I got this shot of the Georgetown Light and part of the jury rig holding up the cb is visible (the line going to the mast):



Here's the boat beached, intentionally this time, again with the jury line visible around the hull:



My wife got a better shot of the lighthouse as we departed the island to motor the 12 miles back to Georgetown (the mouth of the Bay leading to the Atlantic is just beyond the shot to frame-right):



And finally, the tippy-top of the smoke stack of USS HARVEST MOON is just visible in this shot (my cheapie digital camera sems to have a wide angle lens on it; we were not THAT far away).  HARVEST MOON was a side wheeler sunk during the Civil War by a 'torpedo' (which was a barrel filled with black powder).  The red arrow indicates the top few feet of the stack visible above the surface.



So, that's CapnK's AO as seen on a whirlwind three day weekend trip.  I hope next time I go down, I can spend some more time exploring.

[Frank]

Ya gotta love small boat exploring....boat right up to the beach...it doesn't get any better !! Nice pics