Marina Inn at Grand Dunes - we're here for a week

We're snugged in among a lot of other boats

We were at Barefoot Landing Marina at a part of their dock that was not damaged. We wanted to stay for a week for they did not have a weekly rate. Furthermore, they had a crew coming to repair the docks at which time everyone would have been thrown off. We couldn't live with that level of uncertainty so we headed down to the Marina Inn at Grand Dunes which did have a weekly rate of $8/ft.

 But let's backup a moment. I could not raise the Socastee Swing Bridge so I called a cafe nearby and the dear soul volunteered to walk over to the bridge and inquire as to its status. About an hour later she returned and she heard the the repair crew was not optimistic as to a quick schedule. Both the electrical box and the gears were submerged during the flood and were still under water as of this morning. The repair crew wanted to let everything dry out at least three days before touching anything. They would then repair the electrical connections and search the gear mechanism for sticks, logs, etc, anything that might bind the turning of the swing bridge. Their estimate of when the bridge would be operational was the middle of next week. With that our situation at Barefoot Landing became precarious. I could pay for a month's stay or pay daily, neither option was what I wanted. They would not negotiate a weekly rate. The Marina Inn at Grand Dunes has a weekly rate so we headed south and tied up mid-afternoon. Unfortunately, there's nothing around here but they do have good WiFi and cable TV so we'll amuse ourselves until whenever the bridge is repaired.

Sunset over boats

In retrospect, I made several bad decisions. The right choice was going ahead to St James Plantation Marina. It was very well protected and we suffered no damage. The bad choice was leaving that marina before we knew the full extent of the damage to the Socastee Bridge. We should have stayed in the Plantation until we knew for certain that the bridge was repaired. After all, it's only a one day trip to Barefoot and the bridge is the next day. We had heard that the bridge was just waiting for the water to go down, that information was incomplete since extensive repairs still had to be made. Once underway, I should have skipped Barefoot Landing Marina due to uncertainty of the repair schedule and gone directly to the Marina Inn at Grand Dunes.

On the other hand, I should have left St James Plantation on the Tuesday after the hurricane instead of waiting a week (I had thought that a week would let things settle down back to near normal). If I had left Tuesday then I could have passed through the Socastee bridge before high water came. The water had to work its way down from Conway and didn't actually impact the bridge until the following Monday, a full week and two days after the hurricane. So even with the experience of six years of going up and down the ICW, you don't always make the right decisions.

So here we sit. We have WiFi, electricity and cable TV, all the comforts of home I guess. It's just that the view doesn't change for awhile. On top of everything else we can't even rent a car, they are all taken by the insurance companies for their customers without homes and/or a car due to the flood. I guess I can't really complain about that since their need is certainly greater than ours. We have plenty of provisions, we won't go hungry and really don't need to visit a supermarket within the next two weeks so we're fine.