Warm spring filled the afternoon air from the oak trees to the wooden dock on Hobcaw Creek where the Spirit of South Carolina was receiving visitors.

The ship had the tidy, controlled quality sailing vessels always have at the dock, when their masts are bare and they are snugged up against the bumpers.

Her white hull stretched along the dock from the stern to the gentle lift which supported the bowsprit. Everywhere lines were neatly coiled.

Things were propped up, lashed down and quietly sitting where they belonged.

The quiet water of Hobcaw Creek has become South Carolina's second home. It's more sheltered than the Charleston Maritime Center, where the waters of Charleston Harbor pound against hull and dock. Tools reach their muddy destiny on the bottom much sooner when everything is moving around. A quiet berth is a better place to do all the work a wooden ship requires.

Saturday's Shipyard Shindig was a local fund-raiser for the South Carolina Maritime Foundation and the Mount Pleasant Land Conservancy. Nearly everything was local, including the Music, Bar-B-Que and Beer.

The Home of Pepe Hernandez, which sits on the first turn of big Hobcaw Creek, is a pretty spot. Quiet most days, it was once a bustling 18th century shipyard. The landing was once full of workers hacking rot off wooden ships, sealing cracks and building large, new vessels from scratch. Some of those ships fought in the American Revolution. Ballast stones, ribs and fragments of them can still be found in the earth and marshes around the landing.

The crew brings the Spirit of South Carolina here for the long hours of work it takes to keep a wooden ship watertight. They love the spot. There's shade and a place to have dinner under the trees after the work is done. On hot nights, there's a big tree house with an air conditioner which provides a cool place for sleep.

On Saturday, some Pirate reenactors posed with the visitors for photographs on board the ship. Everyone got to practice saying "Argg." It's easy to forget that pirates were a pretty uncommon exception in history. Except for a few memorable years early in Charleston's history, they were more a matter of legend than anything else.

The constants of life on ships in Charleston was the relentless fight to keep the water out, the cargo dry and the ships moving. The real struggle was between the wood eating worm, water rot and the sudden breaks wind and wood will produce. Before modern bottom paints, corrosion resistant materials and synthetic sails, the amount of maintenance a wooden ship required consumed about 20 percent of its life. Nearly every trip of any length involved some time in the yard. That was steady work for the yard at Hobcaw for nearly a century.

I learned a lot visiting the various booths and tents set up by the Creek Saturday afternoon. The spotty history of Hobcaw Creek continues to fill in.

The rumors about being an active base for mine craft during WWII are apparently true. The 1950s mothball fleet of aging destroyers on the Wando is not entirely forgotten. We know of battles and powder magazines. On Saturday, with the big wooden ship at the end of the pier, pretend pirates on the deck and the trays of artifacts under the tents, one got a better idea of what it had all been like.

As I prepared to leave, someone informed Pepe that most of a keg of dark beer remained. The local brewer was concerned that they might not have a cooler large enough to keep it chilled. Pepe assured him the crew would be able to drink it before it went bad.

It offered the prospect of a memorable evening by Hobcaw Creek to add to the long list of those which have gone before, a crew of sailors, a pirate ship, a tree house and beer. Who would ever want to grow up?

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'On Village.)