Wednesday, April 14, 2021.
Weather: Temp: 75/54, Humidity: 100/63%, Top Wind: s24 mph, Precip: none, Miles Traveled: 40
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This is a tiny little shrimping town with less than 600 residents. But there is a dock, and a fresh seafood shop, and it’s half way between Charleston and Georgetown. So we figured – why not stop here again? Unfortunately, it’s Wednesday, and their one restaurant is only open for dinner Thursday through Sunday. 🤨. Dang. We’d been told that it is really good. Oh well – we’ll hit the seafood shop!
But wait -I’m getting ahead of the story. Let’s back up to this morning as we are leaving The Harborage at Ashley Marina. We left the dock at about 8:45. The tidal current wasn’t running hard, we didn’t need to do much in the way planning to be anywhere specific with timing for high tide today. (WHEW!). There was only a little bit of dew to be wiped down, and my towel worked good! 😁👍
This is the Charleston City Marina, right next door. It is huge and has what is known as the “Mega-Dock”, which I swear is a mile long. We stayed at the faaarrrr end of it in 2018, and it gets a lot more wave action than the Harborage. We just had the traffic on the bridge making noise – every time a vehicle went across the expansion joint right overhead of us… clunk, clunk. 🥴
Here are a few shots of the homes along The Battery on the Ashley River side of Charleston. It looked like there was construction work going on along the Battery (the big giant bulkhead and walkway around the waterfront).
There are all different styles of homes along here. The homes here face the water so you can see the whole front of the house. The homes in town are all sideways to the street, with the end of the house at the street and the front door facing the side yard. 🤷♀️ Somebody the other night said that they had heard that it was because homes were taxed based upon their street footage… so the narrow & deep lots were preferred in town.
In the background, you can see (well, I could anyway) at least four church steeples above the roofs and trees.
We tootled our way out the Charleston channel, and into the ICW. By two hours later, we were in the low country grass lands of South Carolina again. We had this kind of scenery for a long time today.
Off in the distance we could see these two ginormous towers reaching for the Moon. WOW! For perspective, notice how little the trees are at the base. The first thing that came to my mind was – how were those built!? I looked them up on the Google, and they are TV Towers that were once among the 20 tallest man-made structures in the world! There are two towers here that are 2000’ feet tall. They must have had to use helicopters or something, right? I don’t know something that tall can be built and erected and can’t find any info it, so my lil’ brain just has to keep wondering.
Meandering along, we finally found some brush along side the ICW. These plant with the puffs of leaves looked like they belong in a Dr Seuss book.
We saw lots of long docks reaching out into the ICW. Some of them belonged to some nice looking homes, some of them…. not so nice.
This one almost looked like it should be a lighthouse.
We pulled into McClellanville and got all situated on the dock. Pretty soon another Looper boat (the one that we saw pull out from an anchorage before Charleston) showed up, named Hallelujah! and parked right behind us.
We’ve been to this little town before, and it is tiny. We didn’t feel the need to wander it today, so we just took a short walk over to the seafood market. It’s not a fancy place!
The docks in front were packed with shrimp boats.
And inside, there was shrimp, but that was about all they had this afternoon. They had crab dip and shrimp dip, but we generally don’t buy those because I can’t eat raw onions. I asked about scallops (because we got some here in 2018), and the ladies said they would have some early in the morning with the new shipment. We bought a couple of pounds of large shrimp and headed back to the dock. Maybe I’ll come back in the morning.
This was a cute scene along the way.
Here’s a fixer-upper. Sometimes the photos on my phone make a building look distorted and kind of leaning. That is not the case here. The building really was kind of leaning and the porches sloped downhill.
We met the neighbors and decided to have docktails at 5:00. It was breezy, so we sat in the shelter of their boat, but even then we only lasted about 40 minutes because the noseeums and other gnats and biters were out. Think invisible tiny bugs with flesh eating piranha teeth! Steve and Ann are really nice folks and it was fun meeting them. We look forward to crossing paths with Hallelujah! again. They are from Colorado, but started their loop from Fort Myers (I think), so they are on our same general path and time frame! Yay for more fun people!
This was my selection for docktails today. Yep – mimosas. I like mine with a bit of cranberry-mango along with the orange juice. Yum!
For dinner, my able bodied assistant helped me clean the shrimp. Their heads were already popped off, so we just needed to shell and de-vein them. I shelled, he did the de-veining with a wooden skewer. That worked really well! (the skewer….. AND the help 😉). I sauteed them up, and wow were they good! We haven’t had FRESH shrimp for a long time, and I was surprised at how much flavor they had. 😋
We didn’t have good cell service, and no wifi, so I couldn’t get this blog done while we were at the marina. In the morning before we cast off our lines, I walked back over to the seafood shop. Their cases were full of seafood! I didn’t want to buy any fish that I had to filet, so I just bought about a half pound of fresh shelled scallops. (And that was $11.)
I did notice three ladies in the back room sitting around a table with a huge pile of shrimp. They all had gloves on and were cleaning shrimp. It’s a big business ‘round these parts!