Charleston Maritime Center – Mail arrives and a night out

100's of school kids gather for the morning outing - a beehive of activity!

One of the challenges for cruising is getting mail. We have ours forwarded automatically to my son in Connecticut. There’s no charge for the service and only first class mail is sent to the forwarding address. Then, we plan ahead to see where we’ll be for a few days and have a Priority Mailer packed with mail sent to the marina where we’ll be at. The Priority Mailer from USPS has no weight limitation, whatever you can pack into the envelope will accepted by the post office for delivery in 2 to 3 days, no later.

The cranes were awesome!

On the way back from the post office, I saw the unloading dock. Charleston is a major port with huge container ships coming through daily. The cranes are of another dimension entirely (see photo – look at the stairs going up!) Even so, they are looking at dredging the harbor even more with the opening of the new Panama Canal to accept even bigger ships with deeper drafts. Ports all up and down the east coast are looking to do the same, they’re in competition with each other it appears.

It’s race week at Charleston and one of the smaller racing boats has a dock at our marina. It’s a small sled type sailboat but in talking with the crew we learned that they topped out at 14 kts today! There was good wind to say the least but the boat literally skims over the water in high winds. Saturday should be even better with winds of 20 kts with gusts to 35 kts!

Imagine, 14 kts in such a small sailboat

If you come to Charleston, you must eat at least one meal at Hyman’s Seafood, it’s a Charleston institution. The food is good at very reasonable prices and even the wine is reasonable at $12.50 a bottle for chardonnay. It was a nice nigh for a walk through town. Saturday brings a weather change with rain and thunderstorms with high winds predicted. With that we decided to stay over another day and leave on Sunday when it’s predicted to be sunny.