It’s been strange, this Hilton Head thing. I mean this place has cache, gravitas, buzz. Maybe it’s because, recently we’ve been to one charming southern town after another and here we can’t even find a town. The information Marce found said that there were three canvas shops on the island so we felt that we had a good shot at finding someone with current sample books of marine canvas. Due to a major rethink about our yellow cockpit cushions we needed to finalize the choices right now!
Now, dear escapees, you may recall that we’ve discovered that not all of us have the “finalize gene”. It’s sad but true, and it can cause problems.
So…the first shop to actually answer our call said she was at her real job and wouldn’t be at the shop until 4pm. The next call raised a guy that said we could dinghy to his shop and he had sample books. Perfect!
It was a good half mile ride in the dinghy before we thought we had found his dock. Nice guy, not the right stuff, but he offered to give us a tour of Hilton Head, which turned out to be a string of sleepy suburban developer gated communities with bad traffic.
Marce found that we were near a Chart House Restaurant and it’s close to happy hour. Putting the two together seemed like a good plan so we dinghied back to Escape Velocity, off loaded the groceries and as we headed back I used another boat as a bearing line to EV because Hilton Head allows no nighttime ambient lighting so it’s going to be pitch black on the way back. Passing close to the boat we noticed that it was covered in bird doo. Must’ve been here for a while.
A couple of Mojitos and sliders later, we hopped into the dink and headed back towards the bird doo boat and as I snickered about all that doo on someone’s pride and joy, turned toward EV’s anchor light. After nicking the prop on an ebbing tide we made it back aboard. In the dancing circle of light from our flashlight, we climbed the steps to our deck. It was hard to tell in the darkness but it looked like someone with incredibly dirty feet had walked all over the steps. I didn’t remember that when we left just a few hours ago. I made a note to check it out in the morning.
The morning light revealed head to toe bird doo! All over the mainsail, jib, solar panels, roof, deck, stanchions, line bags. You name it, if it’s on this boat it’s comprehensively coated with bird doo. No snickering now.
It took most of the morning to scrub it off. We gotta get out of here before it happens again.
But then that’s life on the water.