 Tied up in Washington, NC with my purple friend This is just a short entry to thank everyone who has shown such compassion and concern for us in recent weeks. For those who don't follow our travels on Facebook, I suffered a freak accident on Sunday, April 26. During a docking in Morehead City, NC, the distal tip of my right middle finger was rather violently removed by a rapidly accelerating pilothouse door due to a poor design decision that I have since cured in a fit of pique. I managed to finish bringing the boat alongside the dock and find my missing appendage before passing out, and Stacey did well to keep her wits about her and get the boat safely tied up while marina staff attended to me. I was then brought to a nearby emergency room where the tip of the finger was stitched back on. This injury was just the last half inch or so of the finger, but it did involve a tuft fracture—the very tip of the finger bone. The last seven weeks have been a lesson in human anatomy that I wish I didn't need. The fingertip is growing back. It will likely be ever so slightly shorter than it was, and its appearance will almost certainly not be the same afterward. All of the re-attached tissue has turned into a natural bandage that will ultimately slough off after the healing is complete, and I'm assured that what is happening under that zombie flesh is nothing short of miraculous. Here's hoping, because even seven weeks on, it still looks a bit like something out of a horror flick to this finger owner. Mind you, while it may lack the ultimate length of its former self by a millimeter or three, I'm assured that I will adjust to it in due course and will be back using it as I did before. Here's hoping they're right.  Tuft fracture on display We left Morehead City after two nights and made the two-day trip to Washington, NC, where we have been since. This gave me access to medical follow-up with a local hand surgeon and gave us a place to slow our roll for a couple of months to let the finger heal. Being down a major digit on a dominant hand is more than an inconvenience on a boat. If something breaks and I can't fix it because my hand can't do the work, we have a big problem, so sitting still here has been the right decision. We shall remain here another couple of weeks before dropping lines, but I do find myself being more and more capable.
We did have visitors a few weeks ago. Sean and Louise of MY Vector joined us for a few days, and Sean helped me deal with a bad diesel vent line and also helped me commission/purge a fuel line (the tank has been out of service for decades, so I wanted contamination cleared directly rather than relying on filters downstream), neither of which I could've done at the time. The vent line turned into another job that I have subsequently done—the vent fitting on the top of the tank needed its threads re-sealed. Since then, I had to carefully remove all the insulation from the outside of the tank in the area because it had slowly been saturated with diesel fuel. Not a lot, but enough to really stink up our stateroom. It had to go. I have a package of new insulation board ready to go back on soon. I am typing—nine-finger style—which is to say, I have adjusted, and the pain has subsided enough to allow that. It's taken me seven weeks to get up the energy to type this. I don't want to type a lot, and this installment's length will likely bear that out, but at least the fingers can do some work. I'm starting to take on some wiring on the boat that needed doing. High on the list is replacing the windlass solenoid so we can raise the anchor. I started that job yesterday, and I'm now waiting for parts to finish it. I'm also working on the boat's electronics. I have put in a helm computer and will soon be adding a satellite compass and new radar unit. Needless to say, I'm moving slow, but I'm moving, and I'm finally past the point that I need to sit still to avoid bonking my hand. It is fairly resilient at this point, just not very capable, which logically leads me to end this chapter here, counting my blessings and my fingers.
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 Photo Credit: Liz Marks • Stinkpot as spotted on the Stono River approaching Charleston, SC. We are underway on a favorite waterway—the Waccamaw River in South Carolina, just northeast of Georgetown, having just left after an idyllic evening anchored there savoring a classic, old-school waterfront town—dining at the delectable Rollin Local and walking around. Neither groceries nor hardware were needed, so the stop was purely for the joy of it, and to try out the new-to-us tender—the now-fourth iteration of Li'l Stinker. Last time I wrote here, we were in St. Marys, GA, suffering under a barrage of mechanical issues: overheating engines and a failing, recently rebuilt starter on the generator. The starter quit (again) while we were there; the overheating, however, was cured before finally getting underway, somehow appropriately, on April Fool's Day—making a nice poke to St. Simons, GA, where we anchored in the Lanier Island North anchorage we tend to favor there. We arrived in St. Simons Sound with a mission: ship the starter back to the rebuilding shop in Sanford, FL, and source another locally. Contact was made with the local Great Loop Harbor Host. He was out of town, but was good enough to refer the situation to his mother, who loves to help boaters in distress. We dinghied to the nearby park's courtesy dock and met up with Nancy. She took the starter to the post office—twice, as it turned out, and through no fault of her own. When the starter first failed, the rebuilder told me to ship it back. We used the address on his business card. What we couldn't have known was that he doesn’t get mail at his place of business. It was returned to sender. A call to the rebuilder clarified that I should have used his home address, which he then provided, and Stacey relayed to Nancy. Two post office trips, two flat-rate boxes, each insured for the $600 retail value of the part, ran $40 in postal fees apiece from Nancy's hands to Florida. Twenty days. Eighty dollars. While waiting on all of this postal madness, we sourced and ordered two aftermarket Amazon replacements at $93 each with free shipping to the marina in Beaufort we’d be using in mid-April with a week-long turnaround. Finally, our inconvenience had an expiration date, and as I’m writing this weeks later, the generator is humming satisfyingly beneath our feet. Regardless, we feel so fortunate to meet people as wonderful as Nancy in our travels, and could not thank her enough for her generosity of spirit and deed. She also brought us her gas can so that fuel might be sourced for our backup generator—a Honda EU2000i carried "just in case." A replacement gas can was shipped to her house to repay our debt. New friends were also met at the nearby marina who helped in a failed attempt to find a replacement starter at a nearby equipment dealer. Thanks, Rob and Alanna (loopers on M/Y Let's Go)! The risk in these day-by-day re-tellings of boatlife is that the pathos often begets bathos, and this might be such an inflection point in this missive. At the risk of oversharing, and in an effort not to, I'll shift gears a bit and deviate from the minutiae of our lives to the high and low points, spare the tedium, and invoke some observations, life lessons, and filtered cognition from this unkempt chapter. First, the Honda generator is now officially a "parts box"—likely for someone else. One working "run" was managed before it gave up the ghost; time and sea air officially have had their way, and it is no longer the source of power we were depending upon it to be. As a consequence, a few long-day hops followed to keep batteries topped up while accelerating us northward. We made a consequential stop for a few days at South Carolina Yacht Club in Hilton Head where we finally met and dined with a long-time internet friend, Ted, and his lovely wife, Patti. At Ted's urging, we soaked in the "yacht club life" (and the shore power extravagance) for three nights on the club’s guest dock over Easter weekend. During dinner, a casual mention of the search for a dinghy sparked a connection; Ted happened to know that his friend Tom had one nearby that was perfect and at exactly the right price. On Sunday, a walk to Tom's home revealed the like-new Zodiac in a pristine garage where it had spent six stress-free years out of the sun, and where it immediately inspired equal parts relief and trepidation. Our old dinghy was a PVC inflatable RIB with a zippy 15 hp electric-start Mercury; this Zodiac before us was the same 9.5 feet of boat but with a 6 hp recoil-start Tohatsu and admittedly superior hypalon sponsons. On paper, it looked like a step down in almost every dimension except condition and sponson material. The price, however, was very right, and a bird in hand being worth what it is, the deal was struck. Tom launched her Monday at the marina ramp and brought her around to the guest dock, where we craned her aboard and promptly lashed her, deflated and standing on end in her storage bag, to the mast. Stinkpot had no room for two dinghies, and with the new boat safely stowed, the old Brig remained in service for whatever came next. Tuesday, a move was made to Beaufort to anchor near Lady's Island Marina. The old Brig had one final errand in her—ferrying us the mile or so ashore to collect our waiting Amazon packages (that did not include the starters—those would arrive later in the week). We tried to amend our reservation to get us into the marina sooner, but there was no space until Wednesday, April 8. Docking in a very stiff wind that threatened Stinkpot and the boats along the fairway, it happened with textbook efficiency without casualties of any kind. Once lines were made, the shore power and all that was missing without a working generator was again on the menu, leaving Stinkpot's crew grateful for the electrical respite. The Beaufort stop was far more than just a power socket. Facebook Marketplace completed a handoff on the old dinghy to new owners, and with her gone, the Zodiac finally took her place on Stinkpot’s boat deck where she began rewriting our expectations. The whole rig weighs a third of what the Brig did. On the water, she's remarkably spritely and responsive, greasy in the turns with her much shallower keel. What had looked like a compromise on paper turned out to be an upgrade in every way that actually matters. We also did receive a new starter for the generator from Amazon for 16% the cost of an OEM unit, and it now purrs contentedly below decks making power when we need it. The marina also served as a place to leave Stinkpot while we drove back to Fernandina Beach, FL in a rental car, to represent Argo at the MTOA Rendezvous. It was a great time meeting up with so many like-minded souls who love traveling our waterways as much as we do. So much passion and appreciation was on display, we couldn't help but feel gratitude for the adopted-if-transient community of which we are now a part. With our ultimate return to Beaufort, we topped up the larder, returned the rental car, and dropped lines to continue north on Sunday, April 19. For the last three days, long days have been the norm to get north for the AGLCA Rendezvous in Norfolk, VA, in early May. The sounds of North Carolina can be wildcards when the winds howl, so we didn't want to leave it to chance that we'd just breeze through unchallenged by Mother Nature's capriciousness. We are now working to slow the roll a little and enjoy what is, for us, a most enjoyable section of the East Coast cruising corridor—the Waccamaw River from Georgetown to Myrtle Beach—where we are now anchored on Bull Creek. The anchor windlass that allows us to deploy and haul our heavy anchor tackle is showing signs of the same entropy that dogs us day in and day out. With any luck we can nurse it along until we are stopped somewhere we might source parts for it. The battle continues. Having laid all that out—just over three weeks of life—in almost daunting detail, it is easy to wonder why we do this at all. Stacey and I both struggled with that through the cumulative grind of overheating engines, starters that wouldn't start, and winds that wouldn't quit. There was no single breaking point, just the slow accretion of difficulty, day after day. Life could be lived on land, avoiding all these frankly difficult logistical challenges; living comparative luxury with toilets that don't need to be pumped to shore facilities, trash that is whisked away curbside, and utility connections that are always on and working. Why? Why would anyone choose to introduce such complexity to this simple existence? What carries us past the hard stretches, ultimately, are the moments when they end. Georgetown appeared around a bend bathed in Tuesday afternoon’s golden light, quiet water, the town just sitting there welcoming us in. We dropped the hook, took the new dinghy ashore for no reason other than the joy of it, ate well, and walked around a place that time had been kind enough to leave mostly alone. The weight simply lifted. Not because anything was resolved, but because life’s beauty has a way of rendering the unresolved irrelevant for a while. For me, and I suspect for Stacey as well, it is about time and memories. In a more conventional life, three weeks would pass in the blink of an eye. These last three weeks, with all the trials, successes, friends, and travel, it feels like months not weeks, by comparison. While adventuring, time expands at our feet. Our lives are longer out here. Our days last longer. Our meals taste better. Our victories are sweeter. Our defeats, however, are also so much more painful somehow. Everything is simply more intense—the highs and the lows—and that matters. Henry David Thoreau observed as much in the opening lines of Walden, which I will resist quoting here since we all sit a moment’s Google from his well-aged prose. Suffice to say, he was onto something. In this life we've chosen, it legitimately feels as though there is simply far more at stake all the time. Our days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months, and the last five years of cruising feels objectively like five decades in the best possible ways. How many anchorages? How many docks? Every sunset and sunrise is a unique memory—a moment of life that didn't get lost in the din of day-to-day living we once took for granted. How precious is that? Flowers smell sweeter. We see all the birds and hear their songs. We marvel at each sunset and the expansive spread of the Milky Way that follows. We are untethered from convention and constraint. Neither of us knows what day it is without consulting an electronic device. The news of the world is a distant thought. It's not that attention isn't being paid. The vendettas of angry men and the fractured body politic are known, but permission is given to avert the eyes and save them for the field of flowers or the historic village around the next bend. The place where the air is fresh and time stands still in a sort of never-ending golden hour that warms body and soul. Where are we now? It truly doesn't matter. We're here.  Sunset near the southern end of Watts Cut Disclaimer: This blog post was written in April, before my freak accident that sidelined our travels until July or so (I'm fine, but it was scary for a little while). I will be writing about all of these things soon, but typing has been a bit of a chore of late. More on all of that soon…. Anyone who needs closure sooner should visit our Facebook page and scroll back to the end of April.
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