Day 2-140 onward north to Swansboro, NC

 

Our marina for the past 3 days was about 150 yards from this bridge across the Intra Coastal Waterway. It connects Wrightsville Beach (right or east) to the mainland. It only opens on the hour so we cast off a few minutes before 9:00 am and had only a very short wait for it to open. It was cool at the start, but we kept shedding layers of clothing as the day progressed.

Our original plan was for a 3 hour trip up the coast to Surf City, but as with all good plans...  Just before the entrance to the marina we had to wait about 20 minutes for another bridge that only opens at the top of the hour. It turns out that the marina had gone bankrupt, but they did offer us a slip. It also turned out that with a 15+ mph cross wind it was difficult to back into the slip. The real problem was that the finger piers were only 25 feet long. Trust me. It was impossible to tie a 50 long boat to a 25 foot long dock in that cross wind. We left only slightly shaken and with only a little damage to the rotating davits that launch and retrieve the dingy. Lesson learned?

We saw three really unusual pieces of yard art today.

There was an 8 foot tall wooden swan (profile), a huge stainless steel 3-dimensional sea goddess, and finally there was the most amazing life size statue of a giraffe. It had to be at least 15 feet tall. Today, I am extremely thankful that none of those people are my neighbors...

So, we went back to the Intra Coastal and headed north again. The Admiral served up a wonderful lunch of spaghetti squash with marinara sauce (or as she calls it "spaghetti with spaghetti squash"). We had several options, but we chose to continue about 4 hours north to the town of Swansboro. That was not as easy as it sounds since we had to pass through the seaward side of Camp Lejune. At the southern end of the base there is a swing bridge that opens every half hour (the Onslow Beach Bridge, picture below). That's the good news. The bad news is that the military operates the bridge with "typical" military precision.

Reports on the web from other mariners indicate that if you are even "30 seconds" late in your approach to the bridge, they will not open it. In spite of the dire warnings, we arrived a couple of minutes early, and the bridge opened right on time. I forgot to mention that even before going through the bridge, you have to call and verify that there are no "live fire" exercises planned during our trip. After the bridge, that segment of the trip began with many warning signs like "No transit if yellow lights are flashing"," turn to 530 am for information", "warning: unexploded munitions", and so forth. It spite of the warnings, the area was very remote and beautiful.
The last picture shows me on the dock in front of Lucky Us at Casper's Marina in downtown Swansboro NC. We had planned to at least visit this marina, since they advertise "some of the lowest prices for diesel fuel on the east coast".

We plan to buy about 300 gallons so their ad was very enticing, and compared to the previous marina, we are saving $0.70 per gallon. Pretty good!!!

Swansboro is a pretty, little quaint and friendly town with lots of beautifully maintained house from the very early 20th century.