Hilton Head Island: sailless; swimming headless; early birds

 

GANNET looks odd to me without sails.  This is the first time she has been sailless since she was launched after being trucked here in September 2020 and she will be for a while.  North cleans sails in bunches and tells me I am not likely to get mine back until mid-November at the earliest and that there is no guarantee the mold and other stains will come out.  As Billy Pilgrim said, “So it goes”

After dropping the sails at the North loft we had an enjoyable lunch with Jason, an American friend who now lives in New Zealand and is back visiting, at a famous restaurant in the historic district of Charleston, and then Carol drove us along the harbor front, past huge old mansions which survived the Civil War and still appear to be privately owned, not turned into hotels or AirBnbs.  Out across the harbor I think I saw Fort Sumter in the distance. The harbor is big and with depths of 52’ the deepest on the East Coast and the eighth busiest container port in the U.S., but not as busy as Savannah, which ranks third.  I was not aware of any of this until we moved to Hilton Head Island.

In the absence of sails I have been desultorily scrubbing GANNET inside and out.

When you fly into Hilton Head you see a labyrinth of land and water below you.  This was reinforced on the drive to and from Charleston where it is still tidal ten and twenty miles from the ocean and neither land nor water dominates.  What land there is is flat, so tidal water has nothing to give it pause.

A neighbor loaned me THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES by Colin Woodard.  I have no special interest in pirates, though I have read about them from time to time.  I knew some of the history, but Woodard introduced me to men of whom I had not heard.  He states the ‘golden age of piracy’—I did not know they had a ‘golden age’—lasted only ten years, from 1715-25–and most of them ended on the gallows.  Even those who were instrumental in destroying piracy ended badly.

I find it curious how tribes make heroes of criminals.  Jessie James, Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, and endless others are remembered when almost all of their contemporaries have vanished without a trace.

One pirate of whom I had known is Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard.  According to Woodard he was among the most humane of pirates, never mistreating those he took captive.  He was killed near Ocracoke by an expedition sent by the governor of Virginia into North Carolina illegally.  His head was cut off and tied to the bowsprit of the ship, ADVENTURE, and sold for £100 after the ship returned to Norfolk.  Woodard relates, “Blackbeard’s headless body was thrown into Pamlico Sound, where, according to legend, it swam around the ADVENTURE three times before sinking into the brackish water.”  Of course it did.

I am writing near noon on our screened porch on another perfect day in the marsh.  77F/25C, sunny and a slight breeze.  A sailboat about 40’ is powering south on Skull Creek, one of the early snowbirds.  I have noticed a few every day this week, but then it is almost November.  At least this one has his mainsail up.