Once under the bridge we stopped for a pump out and to fill up the gas tanks, but other than that we had a pretty long day of motoring arriving at Georgetown just after dark and were docked and plugged in by 7 pm.
While in Charleston we had gone ahead and ordered a new propellor for the dingy from Gregory Poole in Southport. The part was scheduled to arrive either Thursday or Friday, so from Georgetown we had less than 100 ICW miles to make in two days. Pretty easy cruising. Wednesday we made it to Myrtle Beach and were docked before 4 pm. We were greeted at the dock by Tator, the "marina mutt." I actually can't believe this is the only picture I took. Every time we looked out he was sitting right on the dock with a toy in his mouth waiting for permission to come aboard.
Thursday we didn't leave until 9:20, after taking showers and cramming a (free!) 20 lb bag of ice into the cooler. Despite the 20 - 30 knots of wind coming right at us, we made it to Southport by 3:30. Both days, having docked so early, we didn't know what to do with ourselves!
In Southport, we enjoyed the high speed internet and decided to check out our Netflix account which we have just reactivated. We had some problems after watching a few episodes of Friday Night Lights Season 2, which seemed to be related to our account settings, and possibly a Netflix bug which was misidentifying our account. We decided to upgrade to the "full" unlimited streaming account, but we discovered it would not take affect until the next billing cycle in a month. Ben called Netflix customer service to ask if there was anything they could do. Netflix has amazing customer service. The person on the end of the line said, "this requires drastic measures" but was able to fix the problem by canceling our account, refunding us the money for this month, and then reactivating our account with the upgraded plan. I think it's a testament to Netflix as a company that they give their customer service representatives enough training, and provide them with the flexibility and computer systems so they can identify and fix these types of problems. It was a huge contrast to when we had to call XM radio the next day (for the second time this trip). Back in December we called because after being charged $20 in October and $25 in November for the Skywatch Weather ($9.95) and News, Talk and Sports ($9.99) plans, we were charged $62 in December. The person on the phone in December was reading from a script and was having a hard time understanding what she needed to enter into her computer to get the right script. At one point no matter what we said, she just kept telling us our charge was $62. At some point she also said we were on a quarterly billing cycle. She was unable to explain why we had been switched to a quarterly billing cycle after being charged monthly before. After over an hour on the phone, and getting into the same feed back loop with the customer service person, we finally gave up and decided to just check the next few credit card statements to make sure we were only being billed quarterly. I thought I had reviewed the statements earlier, but yesterday I discovered we were in fact being charged triple every month since December. Ben went back to battle and spent two hours on the phone. The first customer service person would do nothing but continuously tell us that our bill was for $62 and it was a monthly charge. When we tried to ask him how they got to $62, he was unable to break down the charges between the weather and talk portions of the bill. Finally he transfered us to someone else. When that person answered Ben asked if she had been brought up to date on what the call was about and she said, yes you are disputing the price of the Skywatch program. It just seemed like the first person had to make a selection to be able to transfer the call, and that was the best selection he could make. Finally someone at XM figured out that there was something wrong with our account settings, and then, since we convinced them that since they set up our account (over the phone), the account settings problem was their fault and their responsibility to fix. They are supposed to call back in 24 - 48 hours. We will see. My guess is we are still going to have to fight to get our actual money back and at this point I don't really want a credit since we are probably canceling the service. XM needs to take some customer service lessons from Netflix. (Ok, back to the sailing blog)
Since the propellor didn't arrive on Thursday, we knew we had until about noon on Friday, so did a few loads of laundry, washed the boat and filled up the water tanks in the morning. The part arrived around noon, and we headed off, but were making less than 2 knots in the considerable current and wind so headed back to the dock, watched another episode of Friday Night Lights, and waited out the tide. We're glad we did. When we left (again) at 3, we were making over 4 knots. We made it about 20 miles, just south of Wrightsville Beach, and stopped for the night. Since we got there about 7, no one was around in the marina office, and there weren't any options for 30 amp power where we docked, so we had no heat. It was a cold night, but luckily it was only forecasted to get down to 48, almost 10 degrees warmer than the night before.
We remembered the overhead cable car at this golf course in Myrtle Beach, so this time I had the camera ready. It makes me want to play golf!
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