Mother's Day, Charleston

Below is Laurel on Mother's Day morning enjoying coffee in the cockpit. I think the lads and me would have messed it up but Laurel was way ahead of us. The day before Mother's day she handed us a brown bag, the kind boutiques give you with cute little handles and all. She announced to us that this was her Mother's day gift, and we were to present it to her on Mother's day, a couple of hours later she suggested to the kids that it'd be a good time to maybe make some cards for Mom. I quickly figured out I better get makin one too.

In the end it went great and I coerced the kids to wake up, jump on Mommy and wish her well on her day. We spent that Sunday in Charleston at Patriot's Point which is a Naval museum. For their artifacts they have a submarine, aircraft carrier, destroyer and a coast guard cutter. We called the Marina that abuts it and they let us tie up to their sea wall for a few hours free of charge to visit the museum. Very nice.

The kids were particularly excited about visiting the submarine,"The Clagamore" (by the way Laurel is wearing her self picked present, it's the top) it really was pretty cool, specially seeing the fore and aft torpedos. The crew quarters are teeny. They fit 6 to 8 guys in the space of a medium size closet. The engine room temperatures went up to 120 deegrees and the noise of the diesels was fifteen times the noise of our little diesel with a crew of 23 assigned to it.

Dakota sits in the cockpit of a fighter jet on the " Yorktown"

Below are the kiddos and Laurel on the Yorktown deck.

The Yorktown.

Here Dakota and Laurel check out some of the museum pictures on the Coast Guard Cutter.

When the kids got back to the boat they were so excited that they built their own Lego submarines, here's Dakota and his.

This is Alistair's

It had been a really hot and heavily humid day, when we found out that the Marina had access to a pool we spent the night and took advantage of it. Luckily we had storms and rain in the afternoon which cooled things down, specially for sleeping. We left Charleston the following day at 6:00 in order to make an early bridge opening and then had a short day to Minim creek. Around marker 26, ICW mile 423 to 420 we saw a whole mess of alligators, our first sighting. It was just below mid tide and once we saw the first one it became easy to pick them out. Very cool. We saw them in the water and on the edges of the marsh getting sun. We had a good night at Minim creek and continued on to the Waccamaw the following day.

We are currently anchored in Little River very near the border of North Carolina. Will post another entry soon about the Waccamaw.

Best, C