Road trip to Hilton Head, plus...

In wanting to visit Hilton Head as we have heard so much about it from our son Neil and others over the years, we checked the weather and decided today would be a good weather day for it. Enterprise Car Rental came to pick us up and we were on our way. Hilton Head is about a 45 minute drive from Beaufort.

Skull Creek Boathouse Restaurant

Hilton Head dunes by the ocean

At the beach in the cold

The Tiki Bar at the Holiday Inn on the beach only had a few people around the bar. We sat under the heaters to drink a Dark & Stormy, while a solo entertainer played his guitar. Then we moved on to "It's Greek To Me" for dinner.

When we arrived back at the Marina around 19:30, s/v Mistress was on the next dock...they had already retired for the night. The next morning we dropped them off in town on our way to return the rental car. One of the Enterprise maintenance crew was asked to drop us in town. First he gave us a 1/2 hour tour of the historic town. You could see he was quite proud of the history where he grew up. Julie and I had lunch at Q on Bay and again had the best wings ever.

BoomDeYada Salon

We walked back over the bridge and stopped by an identical boat to ours that was also docked at the marina, Dos Libres. They showed us their boat, it was clean and tidy...it gave us the push to clean and organize our boat the next day. We also switched our forward sail, took down the Genoa and put up a 105 (a storm sail much smaller than the Genoa) because the trade winds we're heading for usually blow at 20Knts/hour...plenty of wind as not to need the bigger sail.

Friday night is steak night at The Fillin' Station and it's packed. During the day, TJ collects $10 each from us at the marina and puts our name down...if you don't get there by 17:00 there may not be enough. The owner, Mark, BBQ's the large steaks himself,

adds a baked potato and a veggie and serves people two at a time as he goes down the list. TJ pulls some tables together on the patio for the crowd from the marina which includes 4 Canadian cruising couples (Brad & Maureen from Mistress is one of them), marina staff and other live-aboards... we don't get served until about 19:00.

On Saturday Nov 22, we started looking at the long range weather forecast in hopes of discovering a weather window for ocean passage. Otherwise we head down the ICW through Georgia...not something we want to do because of shoaling. As luck would have it, there is a weather window next Friday - 6 days from now right after US Thanksgiving. It's long range but we will continue tracking it over the coming week.

We borrowed the marina's courtesy car and went

into town for dinner. Upon our return, the new fire pit was lit with a couple people sitting around. By the time we went to the boat to make a drink and head back to the fire, there were a dozen people. More cruisers and live-aboards saw the flames and came up to the fire.

Sunday brought rain, lots of it. We stayed in bed until 11:00. We worked on a couple of boat projects and had Rachel and Pete for cocktails at 15:00. They are both from Montreal and spoke fluent French...Julie had a chance to brush up her French. They invited us back to their boat, a 48' power boat for dinner...we brought the shrimp and Pete and I took their heads off (the shrimps) and cleaned them.

Cleaning shrimp