Yesterday, we visited the Brookgreen Gardens which is about 20 miles south of Myrtle Beach, SC.

WOW! and Double WOW!

This is one of the most fantastic sculpture gardens anywhere! Sculptures are all (or almost all) displayed ourdoors in formal gardens in an 18th century plantation setting. Brookgreen has the largest collection of the works of American sculptors in the world, and it is extremely well kept and obviously very well funded. This is the central "Liveoak Allee" where you stroll through huge liveoaks that are 250 years old or older with 6-8 ft. diameter trunks and 100 ft. tall. It is a central garden surrounded by sculptures. The rest of the acres are large formal gardens, beautiful in their own right, studded with exquisite sculptures.

This one deserves being blown up just to recognize the sculptor's sensitivity for the look between the two deer. The masrshes behind this scupture are 18th century rice paddies from the plantation. Raised paths behind the deer's head that lead down to the river are the original 18th century irrigation levees for the fields.

The liveoaks were planted by the original owners of the plantation in Colonial times before 1750 and possibly before 1699 when the King of England granted these lands to some of his friends and relatives who used them to create huge and very profitable rice plantations using slave labor. Interestingly, they knew very little about growing rice, but they found some of the slaves had grown rice with irrigation channels in Africa and they created the rice paddies, irrigation ditches and African style "trunk" irrigation valves that made the very productive plantations. I imagine that the freshwater marshes and swamps looked in 1690 much like they have reverted to today....full of cyprus trees, huge marsh grasses, deep mud and insects. The trees were cut by hand, the dikes were built by hand the grasses were uprooted by hand, the fields were leveled by hand enough to allow complete flooding 6 inches deep across acres of fields, and the rice shoots were grown, planted, harvested and winnowed by hand. It was very hard labor and added to that was malaria carried by the local mosquitos. The plantation owners always left for the ocean shores and summer homes before what they knew as "summer fever" struck. (It's interesting that they were called "Planters", Huh?) They had no idea that the 4 floodings of rice fields was the cause of it through mosquito populations.

There is absolutely no way to use photographs to do justice to this combination of natural setting and sculpture collection, but as you walk through acres and acres you are continually amazed. The building and grounds crew gets an A+ from me for excellent gardens, flowers and trees and the selection of sculptures does also. The entire museum gardens were concieved and impelmented by Anna and Archer Huntington, whom were fabulously rich New Yorkers that fell in love with South Carolina and bought 3 large abandoned rice plantations in the 1930s. Anna was a very well known sculptor and her works are here. In addition, the Huntingtons bought many American sculptures to include in the museum garden along with Anna's works. They funded the non-profit corporation that now runs it, including additional purchases made by the Board of Directors under the Huntington's rules. I liked their rules: American born or naturalized sculptors and only "figurative sculpture", which means "no abstract art"...just things you can recognize for what they represent. That leaves out a very large segment of world sculpture, but it also really defines the sculptures persented here and lets you immerse yourself in that narrow slice of subject matter. There are now just over 1,050 sculptures in the collection. Above, is Anna Huntington's "Diana", one of her personal favorites.

Anna also did two outstanding jaguar sculptures. She did them from memory of an instant in time at the New York zoo when a jaguar was climbing down from a rock to the zoo floor and a zoo keeper clapped his hands, startling the jaguar to freeze for an instant.

This is a sculpture of Dionysus (a greek god) in carved marble covered by gold leaf. Again.... no way to do justice to this in photographs.

There are some very well known sculptures here, such as "The End of the Trail" by James Earl Fraser" in 1915, signifying not just a tired indian ona tired horse, but the end of the Native American way of life brought on by locomotive transportation and the ensuing expansion of frontiers and settlers into indian lands.And one of my personal favorites was this 2300 lb. bronze named "Eat More Beef" (you have to look him in the eyes to understand.

There were also hundreds of acres of beautiful trees and meadows. For one spectacular tree, this Swamp Chestnut Oak is a huge example of a "wolf" tree.....one that grew as a lone wolf, not confined by any other trees, permitting symetrical unrestrained growth. Yup....that's Kathy under the tree. This sculpture garden wonderland has tickets that are good for 6 days, and for good reason. We spent all day there walking, looking, sitting, and we only saw the main gardens. There are also the lowland rice growing tours, the nature tours, a marsh boat tour, and a small local animal zoo.

Tomorrow we're going into North Carolina, cruising up to Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington.

After anchoring in Thoroughfare Creek last night, we hauled anchor and cruised up the ICW to Myrtle Beach, SC today. Kathy read in a travel book she has that the population of Myrtle Beach goes from 23,000 year around residents to 450,000 people in the summer season! There are certainly loads of unoccupied condos at out marina, which is really a large "Dockominium" called the Myrtle Beach Yacht Club. It looks to me like there are also loads of new, unsold condos at this same location.

The ICW here mostly runs along the Waccamaw River, which is a very pretty stretch of river. When I was taking this picture, Kathy saw an Osprey land on its nest on the green channel marker, so I knew to watch with my camera when we got there.

When we got there, the osprey flew around the nest and landed agoin, and her's the picture of it landing. I thought it was one osprey with chicks, but when I blow up the picture, I can see it's two adults.

The weather forecast is for high winds and lots of thunderstorms and rain, so we're tucked in to the Myrtle Beach Yacht Club. We got a rental car so we can drive to the Brookgreen Gardens, which is supposed to be a really excellent sculpture garden. It's mostly outdooors, so we may need to wait until Monday afternoon after the storms have passed.

We're anchored in Thoroughfare Creek, which is a tributary to the Waccama River where the ICW is located in this part of South Carolina. It's about 40 miles south of Myrtle Beach, SC.

Thoroughfare Creek goes around Sandy Island, a slightly inhabited island (or inhibited island as Ang might say) between the Waccama River and Thoroughfare Creek. There are some hardy families that live on the island, which is reachable only by boat and has no connercial power or water available. It is visited by lots of local boaters for swimming and jumping down the large sand bank faces. When we got here at 4 PM, there wer 3 or 4 small boats at the banks (see picture) but by 6 PM they were all gone and 5 other cruising yachts had anchored in the creek with us. It's called a creek, but it's 300 yards wide and 20 ft. deep. Except for the other yachts, all we can see is nature. This is what anchoring out is all about. Really beautiful and peacefull. I only have one bar on my cell phone so I'm lucky to have been able to connect to this blog, but it worked!
We took Daisy to the sand island and she quite enjoyed it. This is the sand bank facing Nonchalance. It's veryt steep and soft sand....good for jumping down, like "dune jumping".

We came about 75 miles North on the ICW today, mostly through salt marshes and some interesting rivers. There were dolphins surfing our wake at one of the wide spots in a tidal river basin. I couldn't get a picture of them jumping, but this is actually an adult and a baby dolphin. The baby is on top and the adult was swimming and surfing below. Maybe dolphin surfing school?

Evening time, and sunset plays with the light and shadows on the river. Tomorrow we're going to a marina in Myrtle Beach where we'll stay for the weekend because it's supposed to get very windy Saturday night and Sunday due to the low moving over the Southern U.S. today.

We visited Charleston, SC again today. It's nice to get a "late" rental car for 2 days when we're here for 4 nights. We just pick it up mid-afternoon the 1st day and return it mid-afternoon the 3rd day so we really have a car for a good part of 3 days.

We went to the Heyward-Washington House, which was built in 1772 and is still, incredibly, pretty much in original condition from that period. It was owned by Thomas Heyward, a signor of the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington stayed here for a week or so in 1791. They have on display the original letter from President Washington thanking the Heywards for the use of their house. The rooms have been painted in the 1772 colors, but the faux grained wood paneling going up the stairs has the original 1772 paint!

The house is on lot #72 of the 1694 "Grande Modell" street plan for Charleston and the lot is the same size today as it was when it was first granted to an early Charleston inhabitant at that time. Therefore, it has a very deep yard with a garden in the back which is today taken u by this formal garden viewing the house from the rear. In the 1700s there would have been a much smaller garden and then room for horses, hay, vegetables, etc. The carriage house and stable is on the right and the kitchen and privy is on the left in this picture.

There is a truly spectacular collection of 18th century furniture in every room of the house, most of it made here in Charleston. This secretary breakfront which is deemed to be one of the finest pieces of American made furniture in existence anywhere today.

The Camellias were in bloom in the garden, the first we have seen. The individual flowers are so perfect that they look like Disney drawings of flowers.

Then we visited Market Street, which is the old downtown marketplace in historic Charleston. It was awful! There are large cruise ship docks at Charleston and the cruise ships disgorge hundreds of tourists that all come to see the typical tourist garbage sold in the old marketplace. It was crowded and uninteresting to say the least. T-shirts or snow globes, anyone? I'm surprised they didn't have pictures of Elvis painted on velvet.

We ate lunch at Tristan and we had the best crab cakes of the many we have tried so far on the East Coast. It was almost all lump crab meat magically held together by almost no stuffing and served on a sauce that melded with the crab beautifully with thin sweet potato shavings fried crisp. Yummm........ If you come to Charleston, eat here!

We visited a few interesting spots in Charleston today.

First was Drayton Hall Plantation, which is an incredibly preserved 18th century plantation, which is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Kathy is a member of the National Trust, so we got in free instead of paying $28 for 2 of us. The house was built in the 1740s and is today much like it was at that time with all original woodwork and wood carvings, floors, walls and one incredible ceiling. The house was never electrified or plumbed for modern habitation due to a number of reasons, but it does have a few changes made during the 19th century, including the now fading blue paint on all of the walls. The liveoak tree in this picture was standing tall here in 1738 when John Drayton purchased the property and is now around 300 years old.

The rear of the house and this garden path was the main entry from the Ashley river, which was used for most transportation in the 18th century. The pathway to the house from the river is the original path and view also.

Inside the plantation house, the dining room had a carved plaster ceiling that was original to the house when it was completed in the 1740s. To make this, the ceiling was covered in plaster and after it hardened, a master carver carved the hard plaster into the detail you see here. The carvings are in relief, so the rest of the ceiling had to be carved away, leaving this carved detail. This is the largest and most complete carved plaster ceiling in the country. One other ceiling had molded plaster ornamental work which was applied to a flat ceiling, much like today. The other rooms had flat plaster ceilings put in by the National Trust in the 1970s because the all but 2 ceilings were destroyed by water damage after the family gave the roof's lead gutters and valley trim to the Confederate Army to melt down into bullets.

The plantation raised rice using slave labor and shipped it and other crops down the Ashley River. There were no slave quarters left, but there was a very small spiral staircase hidden in between the rooms and walls where the house servant slaves could go up and down without being in the owner's parts of the house. The basement was the main working area and secondary kitchen and the slaves mostly worked in the basement. I can only imagine how hot it was down there in Charleston in the summers, and very likely buggy too. There were no screens at that time and all windows and doors were open to the various bugs in the area, including sand gnats which were biting all of us today. All of the interior walls are paneled in cypress wood, which is so bitter that the bugs and termites won't eat it.

Of course, it also got cold here in the winters and every room had a fireplace. John Drayton installed a "new" design of fireplace in 1760 and liked it so much he had them all redone with that design, including those in the slave quarters. Still, I can only imagine the hardships the slaves endured during those times......a sad testament to man's inhumanity to man.

There was a 2nd floor ballroom and 4 bedrooms. Can you imagine the people from Charleston coming out here by boat up the river and walking up the long garden walk through the bugs in their finery for a ball? Drayton would have had to plan his party evenings for a day when the tides were moving upriver at the hours when his guests would be coming and send them home downriver on an outgoing tide. Kathy says maybe they brought their fancy clothes with them and changed after they arrived, and a few of them could have lived within a few miles and arrived by carriage (through the mud and bugs).

Then we visited the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston. It is an extremely well done aquarium with many displays of fish and aquatic wildlife. This one is a "small" saltwater aquarium at the main entrance, just to put you in the mood. It's fascinating because it is a 12 foot tall free standing oval tank, so you can walk all around it and see in really well.

I won't bore you with a bunch of fish pictures, but they went through aquatic environments by type in different rooms. Above is a freshwater stream environment with fish about 3 inches long.

They also had a huge tank with a 30 foot tall glass wall with the pelagic (open ocean) fish. The jacks in this picture are all about 2 1/2 ft. long.

And there are sheepshead fish in the tank even though I didn't see any live oysters for them to eat. After catching a big sheepshead in Sarasota and letting it go, I recently bought one at a local seafood market and sauteed it. Quite nice and firm with very sweet meat. The only problem was that it was $3.95 per lb. as a whole fresh fish...(sounds fine right?)....but when that was filleted it came out to be over $15 per lb. for the filets. Oh well, live and learn! Next time, I'll catch my own again and eat it. The fishing guide books say they're the best eating game fish, owing to their pure shellfish diet.

On the deck at the Aquarium, you can see the Charleston bridge, reminiscent of the Alton Illinois bridge.

You can also see the naval ship display across the river. This is an aircraft carrier and destroyer. There is a submarine behind them. All ships are available for public tours.

Charleston, SC tides.

We're on "floating docks" which are by far the best because you don't have to worry about tying the boat so it can go up and down with the tides. You just tie to the dock and the dock goes up and down. There is about a 5 ft. tide here, and 7 ft. tides in Beaufort yesterday. You can see the dock pilings way above the boat in the top picture at low tide, but about even with the top of the boat in the bottom picture as the docks rise to high tide. Most of the good marinas on the southeast coast have had floating docks.

Oysters anyone??? There are thousands of them clustered all over the dock legs, exposed at low tide.

But at high tide, they're happily filtering the Ashley rider tidewaters.

Hey look at all the extra unused docks at our marina!

But at low tide, you can see why they're unused. They've been silted in by the river and there's no water at high tide, just pure mud. That blue sailboat has about 4 ft. of keel stuck in the mud! The river probably silts in these docks too fast to keep them dredged.

We did go see Battery Park (Yup...like New York City, it's where the artillery tp protect the harbor used to be).
There is a statue to honor the fallen heroes of the Confederacy with a statement to the effect that we should count them happy as they had faith and beleived in their cause and endured a great fight.

And we walked the seawall wall along the waterfront in front of the Victorian homes overlooking the bay. Many had a view of of Fort Sumter across the bay. This evening, we went to a very Southern style restaurant for dinner.

Cruise ships in the ICW!

When we woke up this morning, this large cruise ship was docked at the town dock right at our marina. Actually it's small for a cruise ship, but it's large for Beaufort, SC. We have seen these cruise ships at 2 or 3 other towns where we have stopped along the East Coast. They go from small interesting port town to small interesting port town just like we do

We're in Charleston, SC tonight. We cruised up the ICW on a cold day (40s this morning and 50s all day). We even ran the generator while we were cruising do we could turn on the heaters and Kathy made cocoa. This is a typical ICW stretch.

We also went down the Coosaw River today and through the St. Helena Sound, which is very big and reasonably deep. There are so many marshes and sand flats for miles around the river deltas that there are no houses or roads, so you feel like you are going through a wilderness even though you're within 10 miles of urban areas most of the time. As we got closer and closer to Charleston, the banks became more lined with houses, and then lined with big fancy houses.

We plan to stay in Charleston for 4 days or so before heading North.

We're in South Carolina! We arrived here in Beaufort, SC about 3 PM today. Our friend Bill Stone advises that if you're in Beaufort, South Carolina, it's pronounced bee-you-fert, but if you're in Beaufort, North Carolina, it's pronounced bow-fort. (Gott'a get them right!) We were pleased to see the Stones again as we passed the marina downriver from Beaufort. We are staying at the downtown city marina so they got a ride into town to meet us for dinner. Very nice! The only problem all day is that it's COLD.... just mid-50s today and 31 overnight. BRRRRRR....

The Beaufort Downtown Marina is located right at the city's cute and touristy downtown. It's full of nice shops, restaurants, etc. and I even bought fudge. What'a tourist! Kathy bought 2 cinamon rolls for Easter breakfast tomorrow morning. We'll stay here tomorrow to see the town, but we expect most places will be closed for Easter Sunday.

The waterfront has been completely renovated recently and is really nice. There is a wide brick paved wa;kway all along the ICW with excellent landscaping and the restaurants have opened doors and al fresco dining along the riverfront. The picture above is a nice, large pavilion along the waterway and you can just see the bow and flybridge of Nonchalance through the 2nd opening from the left side of the pavilion.

Here's our Great Loop Route progress map. The red line has really grown since I last put it on the blog. This is a wonderful trip and we're really enjoying it.

We visited the Savannah riverfront and two historic cemetaries today.

First, we visited Bonaventure Cemetary, which is out on the Savannah River. We actually passed it on the river when we were out in Nonchalance. There were lots of old graves with markers dating from the 1830 and 1840s when the downtown colonial cemetary filled up and "new arrivals" had to come here. Some of the memorial stones carried very poinient sentiments and some sones were carved beautifully and artfully.

There also was a veteran's section with many WWI, WW2, and some Korea and Vietnam era veterans. I found this little sign to be a bit out of charactor with the feeling, but I guess there's always room for a little marketing message.

Savannah's downtown riverfront area is very old and quite interesting, the only problem being that this is high tourist season and there's a constant traffic jam and no parking available. Of course, cotton was king in the early days, like 1800 to 1860. This is the Cotton Exchange where cotton bales were bought and sold before being loaded onto sailing ships bound for Europe and the northern states.

This is the charthouse, now a restaurant on the riverfront. The cobblestone streets here and some of the buildings were made from the ballast stones carried here in sailing ships that needed extra weight to sail here empty to pick up cotton.

All along the riverfront, there's a nice mixture of tourist shops, restaurants and downtown businesses.

Some of the really big ships sail right past downtown on their way to the Class A seaport. Larry thought this might be a natural gas transport ship.

After lunch, we visited the Central Market which was a few blocks of street with pedestrian traffic only, lined with mostly art shops and art studios, mixed in with a few fudge shops and t-Shrit shops plus the horse drawn carriage tours. The horses were very tolerant of tourist's kids patting them on the forehead. I liked the shop that had many carved wood birds, including this American Bittern, doing it's bitern thing, looking like a vertical stand of reeds.

In the afternoon, we visited the downtown colonial cemetary (the one that filled up about 1840). It had the graves of some famous colonial and revolutionary Americans like Button Gwinnett, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Archibald Bulloch a staunch revolutionary supporter and member of the 1775 Continental Congress where he won John Adam's praise. He was also Teddy Roosevelt's great, great, grandfather.

This is the grave of 3 Habersham brothers that all served as officers in the Revolutionary War - Joseph, John and James. John Habersham was also a member of the Continental Congress, Collector of the Port of Savannah and firts trustee of the University of Georgia.

This evening, we dropped off Julie and Larry at the airport for their return to Houston. They rented their car for a week and were here 6 days so they gave us the car for the 7th day, which really comes in handy. It was nice to have them as fun guests on the boat with us.