Georgetown

         It was a short run to Georgetown.  We were anchored in the harbor by 1130.  Georgetown is South Carolina’s third largest city, and was the heart of the rice industry during the antebellum years.  It’s a charming southern town with many shops and museums and historic houses and churches which date back to the 1700s.  We went ashore with a propane tank and walked through part of the downtown and the neighborhoods to the major shopping areas where we found a wonderful place called The Ice House which advertised worms, tackle, minnows, and hot dogs as well as ice and propane.  They had a refill station, which we prefer over a tank exchange, and our tank was filled in no time.  (We went back the next morning and had another one topped off.) 

Georgetown free docks next to the SC Maritime Museum.

Boat chores taken care of, we set off to tour the Gullah Museum, where the docent there explained the panels of one of the quilts in great detail.  The Gullah people were slaves brought over from several countries in West Africa.  Many were known for their craftsmanship and their ability to farm, both skills sorely needed in the new world, from the Caribbean and Mexico to colonial Carolina.  Under their guidance and of course, their unpaid labor, South Carolina became the rice capital of the Americas, growing acres and acres of rice and shipping it at great profit to England.  The next morning we toured the Rice Museum and we were very impressed with the engineering and brutally hard work it took to create a viable rice field.  Cypress swamps were cleared, dykes were built, small dams with hand-operated gates were created to control the flow of fresh water into the rice fields.  The process could take seven years.  If salt water got into it, the field was ruined for years.  Since then we’ve been able to spot remnants of dikes and dams all along the ICW between Georgetown and Charleston.  Rice was still grown here after the Civil War, but without that free labor it wasn’t nearly as profitable, and then a series of hurricanes in the late 1800s pretty much wiped out the industry in this state.  While there are a handful of working plantations here, rice is commercially grown in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and California. 

Cypress swamp.

Rice field.

        We also toured the South Carolina Maritime Museum, a portion of which is devoted to depicting the slave trade.  Very sobering to see the ads for the slave markets and see the drawings of how the people were chained belly-to-back in the holds of ships.  South Carolina (Charleston) was thee port of call for slave ships.  

        Friday afternoon (Nov 18), after having seen as much as we could see in Georgetown, we left to continue our journey south.  We found a pretty spot in Minim Creek for the night and were entertained virtually all night by small boats buzzing by.  We think they were duck hunters staking out their spots for the morning, as we passed by several duck blinds, camoflauged boats, a decoys when we set out after sunrise.  We didn’t see any ducks, but we did hear the hunters shooting.  We did see egrets, herons, and oyster catchers, and there were also several dolphins that came to play at our bow.  We spent Saturday night in a beautiful little creek named Seven Reaches, not far from Charleston.

Seven Reaches Creek