Day 2-141 one of our best ever days on the water!

Welcome to April, and no, the title is not an April Fool's Day joke. We left Swansboro, NC at 9:20 am after filling up with 283 gallons of diesel fuel. As I said yesterday, the price of $346.9 per gallon at Casper's Marina was $0.70 per gallon cheaper than other marina that we had passed. We also bought a couple of gallons of ethanol free unleaded gasoline for the dinghy. Now for the sticker shock, the final total was just over "one boat buck".

For those of you that are not familiar with the term "boat buck", the B.O.A.T. refers to "Bring Out Another Thousand... I guess that calling this just one boat buck worth of fuel is supposed to make it less painful??? The upside of this is that we now have about 600 gallons of fuel onboard, and with our average fuel economy of about 2.2 (notice the decimal) miles per gallon, we will not need to refuel for several months. Thus, the smile on my face as we departed Swansboro.

On the way out of Swansboro, we passed under the Emerald Isle Bridge, which was the first of 3 fixed bridges with a clearance of 65 feet that we passed under today. Our destination today was Morehead City, NC, which is a trip of 26.7 miles. The trip should have lasted about 3 hours and 20 minutes at our normal cruising speed of 8 mph. However, the weather became so beautiful that I kept slowing the boat down. Blue sky and no wind meant that the trip just kept getting better as it warmed up to shirt sleeve weather. Pretty soon we were going about 5 mph, which is just above our idle speed of 3.5 mph. We have own Lucky Us for almost 8 years and have put about 1,000 hours on the engines. So, we have seen our share of good and bad weather, and today ranked as one of our best EVER days on the water.

The picture above looks like a cormorant convention (with a couple of seagulls for good measure). They are lined up along a pile of dredge spoil just along the side of the Intra Coastal Waterway. Not very exciting birding lately although we have been seeing many more loons and nesting osprey.

Morehead City is billed as North Carolina's deep water seaport. So we saw a variety of vessels, as well as these tugs. I need to be honest that this picture is included mainly for Grandson Will who really likes tugs...







We also saw this wonderful, large dredge in the harbor.



The working end of the dredge  consists of a big auger and suction hose, but unfortunately, that is hidden by the crew boat. The picture does give a good idea of the size of this particular dredge.

To get to our marina we had to go around the commercial port area and then go under adjacent 2 bridges. The highway bridge is fixed with a clearance of 65 feet, but the railroad bridge has a clearance of only 4 feet when closed. Fortunately, the railroad bridge was in the up position as we approached.

The channel under the bridges is narrow and the current was strong as we passed through. I was too busy doing my "Captain thing" to notice, but the Admiral took this great picture of the "railroad track to nowhere" as we passed through the bridge.

The railroad and the highway over the bridge form the main street in old downtown Morehead City. In fact the road even splits into a boulevard with the railroad track in the center. This may sound kind of like the beautiful pictures of New Orleans with the tree lined boulevard with the street car running down the middle... Sadly, the scene in Morehead City is just like it sounds -a railroad track with two lanes of highway on either side...

Plans? Tomorrow we plan to spend the day doing a little touring in the marina's loaner car around Beaufort, NC which is only 2 miles north of our marina. Beaufort is supposed to be beautiful, and if we like what we see, then out next boat trip may be only about 2 miles long... Stay tuned.