Charleston

Cute little sailboat we passed coming into the harbour.

Charleston is definitely a milestone.  It seemed so far away when we started and now we are here.  It's a tad surreal.  We're are going to lay low on the boat tonight and check out the town tomorrow.  We need a marine store, ol'dreamy's sprung a leak.

You see, as you know our boat has a saildrive and with a saildrive comes a huge hole under the waterline; not ideal. So it goes like this: the engine and saildrive are both bolted down onto a 1 piece engine bed mould. That engine bed is fibreglassed to the hull of the boat overtop of the huge hole. So after 30 years the engine bed must have finally parted from the hull some place under the water and now we have a leak and a sinking ship. Our bilge fills every couple of hours so we need to get our automatic bilge pump working tomorrow (it stopped working a week ago). We did have our manual bilge pump working until a few days ago; have to fix that as well. So at the moment we have to physically bail it out with a bucket. That means setting the alarm and waking up in the middle of the night to bail as well.  That also means we can't leave the boat for more than a couple of hours at a time or she'll sink. It's all good though, just a few minor details, we'll have this all fixed up by tomorrow.

-Chels