April 3, 2022: We cruise to a marina in North Myrtle Beach.
Osprey Marina was wonderfully calm and quiet overnight. I slept well and woke refreshed.
Around the Marina
A lot of boats were stacked in storage at the marina. They used a forklift with very long forks to move them between the water and the shelves.
After a good, hot shower and breakfast, I launched my drone for some aerial photos of this rather unusual marina setup. You see, the marina was a big open area down a long, narrow canal from the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). Boats lined one side of that canal, which is something I hadn’t expected when I looked at it on charts. The marina itself had a bunch of floating docks and was full of boats. It also had a tall covered structure with boats stacked up inside it. I thought the whole setup would make interesting images.
A view of the marina looking back toward the ICW.
A look down the canal to the marina from the other side of the ICW.
Here are some of the marina’s goats. (Not a typo.)
While I flew, a few of the guys who worked there watched. We talked about the drone and how easy it was to fly. I explained that mine was pretty old — an original Mavic Pro — and that I wasn’t going to get a new one until I lost or crashed the one I had. After all, it still took good pictures. They, in turn, told me about the goats they had grazing out beyond the boatyard. I actually saw them in some of the aerial shots.
I guess I didn’t mention the turtles. They came out of the water along the banks around the marina to sun themselves.
I got a call from a friend of mine and was chatting with her when Capt John arranged to have the two toilet waste tanks pumped out. It was getting late in the morning and the marina wanted our parking space back. So when I finished my call, I helped John prep for departure. It was a tight squeeze to get out of our spot and turn around, but John really knows how to work those two engines for sharp turns. Within minutes we were motoring out to the ICW.
The Boat Handling Lesson
We were barely out into the ICW and headed north when Capt John had me take the wheel. He wanted me to try turning the boat using the two engines in different directions. I knew the concept and had done it before on a houseboat in Lake Powell many years ago. You basically put one engine in forward and the other in reverse, both at slow speed. If you do it right, the boat should turn slowly but sharply.
Unfortunately, he didn’t explain what the FOUR levers were for. He just told me which lever to shift which way and it didn’t make sense to me. You see, I thought the two on the left were for the left engine and the two on the right were for the right engine. It wasn’t until the lesson was over that he explained that the two on the left shifted the two engines between forward and reverse while the two on the right were the throttles for each engine. I think I would have done a lot better if I’d known that before the lesson.
Oops.
Anyway, he took over and we continued north along the ICW. The entire area was swamp-like, with more trees growing right out of the water and not much going on. It was just as peaceful as the marina had been.
The ICW before and after the turn off for Osprey Marina looks like this.
But that didn’t last long. Soon we were in a much more populated area, with homes on one or both sides of the waterway. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, with light winds and plenty of sun, and there were a lot of boats on the water. All kinds of boats, from WaveRunners to boats bigger than the one we were in. Any boat going in our direction passed us — did I mention that Capt John sets RPM to cruise at 7 to 8 miles per hour? — and of course the others passed us, too. Some obnoxious SOBs passed very close at borderline safe speed. John said that a lot of these people don’t think we feel their wake in a boat as big as Carver 36. We do. Trust me, we do.
Here’s one of the many boats that passed us on that beautiful Sunday.
The houses on either side of us also varied. More than a few were giant homes with impressive docking and/or lift facilities for their boats. Others were more modest homes with docks and/or lifts. The farther north we got, the more homes there were to either side and the more boats were in the water. We were in the heart of Myrtle Beach now — an east coast tourist destination that was much more developed than the area I knew from the late 1990s.
(I haven’t mentioned this yet, but my wasband and some business friends formed a partnership to buy and use a condo at Pawley’s Plantation, a golf community on Pawley’s Island, which was south of Osprey Marina. The whole thing seemed like a giant con to me. They sold them the condo, furnished. Then they promised to manage the rentals for it when they weren’t using it. They’d pay them 50% of the proceeds. But what they didn’t mention is that the owners also paid for any cleaning and repairs. So if a renter broke a chair, the owner would pay for a new one. If a renter spilled a bottle of red wine on the carpet, the owner would pay to have it cleaned or replaced. In some months, the partnership wound up owing the management company money for damage done by renters the rental company had let in. Huh? Even though I used the place for a month one year — trying unsuccessfully to work on a book — I was very glad when they sold the place. It was a financial burden — as most second homes are.)
We passed a few marinas and finally homed in to our destination: Barefoot Marina. This was a relatively large marina on the mainland side of the ICW, right across from a big tourist destination called Barefoot Landing with a lot of shops and restaurants. We received some directions over the radio for parking and followed them to back into a slip inside the marina, not far from the dockhand shack. We were surrounded by huge yachts that I couldn’t even imagine cruising the way we were.
One dockhand came to assist us and I suspect he was pretty new at his job based on the kind of assistance he provided. We were soon tied off in our slip and then had the difficult task of stretching our power cables over an 8-foot span of water without letting the business end touch the water. With that accomplished, we were ready to check in.
A look back toward the ICW from the docks at Barefoot Marina.
It had been a relatively short journey and it was nice to be docked somewhere new.
Here’s our Nebo log for April 3, 2022. We were underway for just over three hours.
Getting Settled at Barefoot Marina
The first order of business once we’d checked in was to get a snack. Once again, we’d skipped lunch. It was about 2:30 when we arrived and we didn’t want to ruin our appetites for dinner.
Inside the Barefoot Marina Bar & Grill. It got crowded later in the day and was still making noise when I went to sleep.
Fortunately, the marina had a restaurant. We headed over. It turned out to be a touristy kind of place, playing up a tropical Margaritaville-style theme. We sat outside in the deck, in the shade where we could overlook the marina and ICW. It was pleasant. I had some oysters and hush puppies. Capt John had hush puppies. I had a happy hour drink, despite the fact that happy hour hadn’t started yet. (I suspect the alcohol goes into the drink at happy hour since there wasn’t much in the one I got.) John had a beer. Our server was nutty and I think it was genuine and not some sort of gag.
We went back to the boat and took it easy. I worked on a blog post about our stay in Georgetown. (I wasn’t nearly as behind on blog posts then as I am now. Sorry!) We had leftovers for dinner and called it a night.
