SC: Isle of Palms (beach and bilge)

Day 325
NM today: ~10
NM To Date: ~5098

With the car positioned in Georgetown to greet us in a few days, we set sail to travel the very short distance to Isle of Palms for our first stop. Now that we are underway, we told Jeff and Devon that they could get their own AGLCA white "looper" flag as they will have actually traveled a portion of the Great Loop!

As we pulled away from Charleston, we got one last look at the historic houses of the area.

A bit further on, we could see Fort Sumter in the distance. Clark and I did not get to visit there, but Jeff, Devon and Sierra went there with Chris and Heather before we arrived in Charleston.

Fort Sumter

 Much of the Intra-Coastal Waterway is a dead bore, but then every once in a while, something unique or humorous appears along the way.

Pirate Smiley

 Since Isle of Palms is quite near Charleston, we arrived there quite quickly. The attraction for a stop over in Isle of Palms was the beach. Sierra loves the water, so a chance to get to the beach was a treat for her.

Isle of Palms - marina

The day did not turn out quite the way we planned as Clark got stuck doing boat maintenance all afternoon instead of enjoying time with family. Once again the sump pump on the boat failed. We replaced it just under a year ago in Canada. Clark was more than disgusted (in more ways than one) to have to be stuck with his head in the bilge draining murky water and fixing the switch on the pump instead of playing on the beach.

Terrible people that we are, we left Clark with his head in the bilge, wished him well, grabbed the sand bucket and spade, and walked the few blocks required to reach the beach. As we walked to the beach, I wondered if we would actually get to go ourselves. Shortly after we started on our way thunder started to rumble nearby. I looked around and saw no decent cover should the storm get any closer. Jeff, Devon, and certainly Sierra seemed undeterred by the threat of a thunderstorm as they marched steadily forward towards the beach. I guess I am not quite so intrepid as they are. Without them along I would have turned back.

We got to the beach, and Sierra immediately began digging in the sand with her shovel.  The first thing she did was dump sand on herself and then lie down and roll around in it. She quite literally gets into it! Although I enjoyed watching Sierra at play, I, on the other hand, have never been a beach lover and try to stay as sand-free as possible. Even so, because I had sunscreen on, I quickly found my legs covered in a thin layer of sand.

Around 5:30 or so, Clark contacted me on the cellphone saying he needed my assistance. It was surprising to me that I heard the phone as I was playing in the surf with Jeff and Sierra getting water for her sand castle construction. Clark had determined the part he needed, West Marine had the part, and we needed to figure out how to get the part to Clark. West Marine suggested having Uber pick up the part and deliver it to us.

I tried to figure out how to use Uber as a pickup and delivery service where I did not have to get in the car, but I could not figure it out. Since I did not want Uber to pick me up at the beach, I started walking back to the boat and left "the kids" playing there. Once I got back to the marina, I used the Uber app to call for a car to come get us for the trip to West Marine before they closed at 7:00 p.m.

The driver was excellent. He drove us to the West Marine, waited while Clark got the part, then took us to the post office so Clark could mail an unrelated letter, and then drove us back to the boat. The round trip calculated out at $21. The driver told us the trick to getting Uber to do delivery. First we would need to pay for the merchandise over the phone so it was ready for pickup when the driver arrived. Then, we needed to put in West Marine as the pickup place and our boat location as the drop off. Finally, we would need to contact the assigned driver immediately to let him / her know what we had planned. The cost would have been half the amount of our trip total had we known this trick. He laughed and said he appreciated the business!

With all our running around I expected "the kids" to be back at the boat already when we got back. They were not back. In fact they were just picking up their stuff and preparing for the walk back to the boat. I gather Sierra really got into the sand after I left. She laid down and made sand angels by moving her arms and legs around to make wings and such. Jeff videoed it on his phone and as we sat on the boat later, Jeff showed Sierra the video of her making sand angels.

Sierra stopped playing the game on Devon's cellphone
long enough to watch the video on Jeff's!!
She's a very busy girl!

 Even though she is only two years old, Sierra has the whole cellphone thing down pat. She knows how to find the Youtube app. Then once she opens that she knows how to find kid videos. She scrolls and clicks, watches, and when that one stops, scrolls and clicks again. It seems to come naturally to her like she was born with a cellphone in her hand!

Clark did manage to fix the sump pump, but he had a pretty crappy day all told. What really irked him about the whole deal was how quickly the part failed. Fixing the same part twice in less than a year made him quite annoyed with the poor quality of the float switch.

Night sky in Isle of Palms.