Savannah to Beaufort (beayou-fort)

Today we traveled from Savannah to Beaufort.  We are in South Carolina!   

European developments in this area goes back more than 400 years!  It was a community long before the US was a nation.  This armory was used in the Revolutionary War!  

The tides here are exceptional.  Like more than eight feet!   We left the boat and took a walk downtown and when we came back the ramp to the docks was no longer a slight downgrade but instead a steep ramp.   No wonder they cover the diamond plate with steel lattice!

On the way to Beaufort we passed Hilton Head Island with it's big houses and large boats.   

It's been a bit since we saw that.  Georgia was very different as you have to go a long ways inland to get to land higher than the flood plain!

But even here there is ample evidence of storm damage.   It'd be hard to use this dock...

We've arrived at Safe Harbor Marina Beaufort.   I had packages shipped here overnight because I've just had it with toilet tank/pump troubles.   They arrived today and I put them in.   

We have toilet victory!   The pump is holding pressure and both toilets now run when we flush and only until they build up vacuum again!   The small things are the best.   It turns out the problem could be solved - with $1,300 in parts and some more labor.  

Once we finished with the toilet it was time to wash the boat.  Each of the last several days we got significant salt spray when we were making crossings where rivers go out into the ocean.    When that water dries on the windows and the boat it turns into this nasty slime that you can't wash off by just spraying and wiping.  Salt works a lot like sand and will damage plastic windows.  The solution is to flood them with freshwater which gets rid of most of the salt and then wash them with special plastic cleaner that will take off the remaining deposits.  It's generally a two rag multi-pass project to clean windows that have salt on them.  The rags get really gross quickly so we use microfiber cloths and they get tossed when they get icky.  It's easy to tell when they're full because the windows no longer clean...

After we finished the basic boat maintenance we headed into town to walk the historic district.  Beaufort is a very nice town.  It's also nice that it's not huge and it's not overly crowded so we could walk around without people being in the way everywhere.  

Beaufort has history that goes back into the 1500s.  It was " discovered " by Spanish and French explorers back in the 1500s.  No one really developed this area though until the 1700s and the first successful settlement was British.    Thus the pronunciation of the town name (bee-u-fort, not bow-fort).  We will be in Beaufort NC in a few weeks and it uses the French enunciation (bow-fort).  

The first thing we walked to was supposed to be the Harriet Tubman memorial.   To our surprise it doesn't exist.... Other than a fundraising sign.  

Oh well.   But we were fortunate that right next door was the Baptist church where Robert Smalls' memorial is in the yard.  

Robert Smalls' story is amazing.   It's one of my favorite civil war stories.   He was trained to be a 'wheelman' (because black Americans couldn't be helmsmen) but he had all of the skills.   He and his family and some friends that worked down at the wharf (where my boat is now parked) snuck into a Confederate ship and stole it with the goal to escape to the North (and the Union army north of  Charlestown).   

Because Robert was a wheelman and knew the signals and the mine locations he navigated the ship and gave all of the correct hand and light signals to get past four consecutive Confederate military forts!  The last was Fort Sumter in Charlestown that delayed giving approval to the signals and then realized what had happened when the ship left the harbor, turned north and headed directly to the Union army stationed outside the harbor.   They immediately dropped the Confederate flags and hung a white sheet his wife had brought from the plantation!   He literally addressed the leader of the flotilla stating he was bringing the Union a gift of former US guns and ammo.   He later captained a number of other ships and helped the Union army considerably with his knowledge of the mine locations as well as how troops and armaments were configured.  

Interestingly he went in to be a political representative for the area and founded the anti-slavery Republican party of South Carolina and got elected as the first Republican to represent the area!

(People have to remember the Democrat party of the time was the pro-slavery party and one that thought African Americans needed special treatment because they weren't smart enough to make decisions on their own.    Robert Smalls' explained that if African Americans could do everything they had done to survive and thrive in Beaufort they didn't need special favors or hand outs,  just equal treatment).   Very interesting dude.

We also stopped at the First Methodist Church here.  This is one of the churches John Wesley visited when he came to South Carolina yesrs after founding the Methodist denomination and planting churches all over Georgia. 

It's actually quite interesting to see the influence two brothers (John and Charles Wesley) could have.  

Beaufort was one of the early areas to take plantations from white owners that were not paying their taxes and sell parts of them to former slaves so they could be land owners and have financial autonomy.  By the early 1900s the town had a thriving black owned economy.   This wasn't the case in many other areas in the south ...  

There are some beautiful old houses here.  

The architecture of this town is really one of southern charm but not gawdy ostentation.  

There are even cute little places that have been around since the civil war...

They also have ice cream.  Amazing ice cream.  Life is good!  I have a good God, a loving wife, a working toilet and ice cream!  Who could need more?  

Well, it could be a little bit less windy.  This entire trip seems to be built around the wind.  Washing the boat in 30mph winds meant everything around the boat getting wet.  Even the AC output in the side of the boat (which normally runs like a hose) was spraying sideways and spray was being carried out and away.  

I'm tired of wind.   At least today the wind was coming from a different direction than the ocean openings we had to cross .. 

47.5 miles today ...

We will not move again until Sept 28, and then to anchor for a couple of nights before.moving into Charleston to be visited by family.   We will probably not blog until we arrive in Charleston.