TEXAS RANGER: February 2015

After 3 ½ months in Southport, NC, Texas Ranger is again moving southward. What was anticipated to be a stop of a few days for a quick engine repair turned into a prolonged stay over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays while we returned to Texas. After driving back to Southport, we spent another 1 ½ weeks there enjoying the community and doing various boat projects. Finally it is time to leave our many friends and resume our travels. Since we obviously did not reach Florida by early November as planned, we now have no set agenda, and so are enjoying stops at several small towns that we had to bypass on our trip northward a couple of years ago. Though we are certain that the intermittent electronic issue which was randomly shutting down one engine is repaired, we still will travel in the ICW rather than offshore for a few days to become emotionally comfortable that the repair is complete! Also, this time of year, fronts are coming through about every 48 hours, so offshore weather windows are quite brief.
Our first day of travel was a delightful clear, cool run from Southport, NC to Little River, SC. We docked inside the well-protected basin at the Myrtle Beach Yacht Club to await the evening blow. The basin is largely surrounded by three-story condos, so the howling norther had little effect on us. After a second evening, we awoke to 24 degrees and frost on the boat, and moved on down the ICW to Osprey Marina, a quaint but popular stop set well off the ICW in a secluded cove. We had anchored not far from here in a beautiful oxbow of the river on our trip north, but the wind is to again howl from the north, so we will hunker down at a dock with electrical power for the heaters! In a day or two (just before the next arctic front) we will travel to Georgetown, SC, a quaint little city that we missed a couple of years ago due to a significant downtown fire that had just occurred. From there, we will journey to Charleston, most likely for a more extended stay, and will fetch our car from Southport to provide access for more extended exploration in the area.