Day 2-145 Busy day in Oriental

For a 20% chance of rain this morning, it was a beautiful day in Oriental with no rain. I slept in so the Admiral went to the Farmer's Market without me. She said the market was pretty sparse, which is not surprising given the early season. I took one of the scooters to West Marine to buy a new quart of varnish. Then I came back and water sanded the rails. After washing them off and partially drying them with paper towels, I had to wait for them to thoroughly dry. Fortunately, that did not take long in the gentle SW breeze. Meanwhile, the Admiral took one of the scooters and went grocery shopping. The big problem was the large amount of pollen in the air. It is so thick that there are bright yellow clumps of it floating on the water. Pollen, like dust, is not good for a smooth finish. One of the locals who stopped by to watch me paint said that they call the pollen that sticks to the varnish "Savannah non-skid". When I applied the varnish, the gentle breeze was off the water and that greatly limited the amount of pollen that settled on the varnish before it dried. If you look closely along the bottom of the picture, you can see what looks like small, yellow spots on the picture. That is pollen that fortunately landed after the varnish had set up and can be brushed off.  There are now about 7 coats of varnish on the rails, and there is a feeling of depth when you look at the surface. Now, that is a very "yachty" thing.

We headed down town for lunch. I had a first ever oyster sandwich with sweet potato fries. I love oysters raw, fried or sautéed, but I had never had them in a sandwich before. It was actually quite tasty.

After lunch we set out to see the marine consignment store, marine oriented antique shop, and the hardware/marine supply store. We ended up buying all sorts of supplies for projects as well as bicycle helmets since we had forgotten ours at home. Earlier in the day the Admiral had mentioned that we need to replace the seat cover on the aft wooden seat in the dinghy. The cover has a thin pad for the seat with very useful  zippered saddle bags for storage that hang down in front and behind the seat. We had laughed and said that we were unlikely to find one in the near future. Our last stop after lunch was the Island Waterway Provision Company, which was very much like a local version of West Marine. Sure enough, they had the dinghy seat cover. For a small town the marine supplies available here are pretty amazing.

As I mentioned yesterday, there are 1100 bikers in town for a multi-day event.

The riders choose their own route from 5 to 100 miles, and they seem to start whenever they are ready. When they finish they all seem to head to either The Bean (coffee shop) or to a waterside restaurant for a beer.  They seem to be fairly serious about the biking, but they are also having fun.






Speaking of fun, after a well earned nap, we set out across the street to one of several art galleries (photo). It is in a converted house and has quite a few rooms full of art.

They had the usual "flat" art like oils, watercolors, and photos, but they had a lot of physical, 3-dimensional art. Welded animals and fish as well as lots of wooden art. When we had just left, I commented to the Admiral about how much I had like some of the art, especially the pecan wood bowl with a brass ships wheel nutcracker on a raised island in the middle of the bowl. It turns out that it was her favorite also. You can guess what happened next...

Well, tomorrow we are off early for a fairly long trip (52 miles) to Belhaven.

Day 2-144 Morehead City to Oriental

Another great day on the water as we went 26.4 miles from Morehead City northward to Oriental, NC.

Most of the trip was in the Intra Coastal Waterway as we cut across a peninsula (?) between Morehead City and the Neuse River. Actually we went up a river that flows into Morehead City. Then we went through a man made cut and into another river that flows north into the Neuse River.

The first picture is a (not very close up) view of an osprey nest on one of the channel markers in the waterway. Going up (north) the east coast, the markers on the west side are red triangles with even numbers. The nest is between two signs and sits on top of the marker. In a natural setting they also like isolated, dead trees near or in water. They are excellent fisherman and catch fish by flying low and snagging them or by actually diving down into the water. We will try to get some better pictures, but I prefer not to get too close when they are sitting on the nest...

The second picture should be titled something like newest, best maintained, UGLY house.

We see lots of older, poorly maintained homes that are also ugly. However, someone spent a lot of money and effort making  this mess (color, "art" on the exterior, etc.)... The admiral says it isn't ugly but instead is distinctive.

Well, that's my opinion, and I am sticking to it.






Near the end of today's short trip we crossed the Neuse River, which is about three miles wide at this point. The small town of Oriental is on the far (north) side of the river just out of view to the right.

About halfway across we spotted a flock of several hundred cormorants. As we approached, they took off more or less all at the same time. The picture (above) only shows about half of the flock.

We are planning to spend two nights in Oriental. If I am lucky (?), the weather will be good enough to water sand and varnish the hand rails on the flybridge and main deck. The Admiral has kindly volunteered to go to the local farmer's market while I am busy. I guess this is part of why she keeps telling me what a lucky man I am to be married to her...

Days 2-142-3 Fun times in Morehead City and Beaufort

We have spent 2 full days exploring Morehead City and Beaufort, NC. Yesterday we launched the dinghy so that we could repair the rotating arms.
The dinghy is stored on the swim platform, and it actually extends about 3 feet over the end of the platform. There are arms that rotate down to launch and to retrieve (and store) the dinghy. Since we have restarted the trip this year, I have backed the boat into two different docks... Not my best moments at the helm, and even worse, several inches of the starboard (artificial plastic wood) broke off each time. The repaired end of one of the arms is shown on the left in the picture, and the broken piece that was replaced is on the right. The "not quite" round hole allows for a wheel to rotate.
     Yesterday, we borrowed the loaner car from the marina to do a quick tour of Beaufort, which is about 3 miles northeast over a high fixed bridge.

I had expected Beaufort to be much more upscale than it is. It has a casual atmosphere with the usual main/waterfront street with lots of shops and restaurants as well as several small parks. I should also say that the summer is the peak season when I am sure it is much more crowded. After a quick tour of Beaufort, we drove back across Morehead City to go to Lowes, Food Lion Supermarket, K-Mart, and the post office. We did this trip in just under the two hour time limit (1 minute to spare) for the loaner car, and no, we did not speed.


Today (Day 143), we started out in the dinghy at about 9:15 am, and headed to Beaufort where there is a free dinghy dock adjacent to the dock for the ferry to Shackleford Banks. 

Shackleford Banks is one of the many barrier islands that make up the outer banks, and it is controlled by the National Parks System. The east end of this island contains an estuary dedicated to Rachel Carson who did much of her research there during the 1940s and 1950s. The picture shows our water taxi that runs every half hour. We were particularly interested in this trip as it will be our best chance to explore the outer banks on foot.

The other BIG attraction to this particular island is that it contains a herd of about 110 wild ponies that are descendants of horses that were stranded there after a shipwreck about 400 years ago. I tend to be skeptical about "tourist attractions" like the ponies, but sure enough, we had only walked about a hundred yards before I spotted 4 ponies about 150 yards away. We walked along on a near parallel path with the grazing ponies. Ultimately, we got to within a hundred feet and saw a total of 8 ponies.

We then headed off toward the center of the island where we had lunch high up on a sand dune (?).

The view was spectacular with the Atlantic Ocean off to the southeast (and oh yes, the Admiral is looking good too!).

After lunch, we headed back to the water taxi, and on the way, we had this great view of the wild ponies.

      When we got back to Beaufort, we had a cappuccino outdoors in the sun. Then we returned to the comfort of Lucky Us which is docked in Morehead City.



We capped off a really great day with a very nice dinner at Floyd's 1921 Restaurant. Tomorrow we are headed off again after we load the dinghy back on board (and hopefully successfully test our repair).

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.


 

 

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.

Days 2-138-9 Weather delay in Wrightsville Beach, NC

First, an explanation of the title for this year's posts. After months of thought (well, maybe more like 30 seconds), I decided to add the number "2" to signify "Year 2".

We ended up staying in Wrightsville Beach for two additional days due to cool, wet weather. Thus, there is not much to report.

All was not lost as we did manage several shopping trips since there were numerous shops, including a West Marine, Harris-Teeter grocery store and a wonderful hardware store within a half mile of our dock. Plus, the Admiral had bought a Tail  Gator satellite dish over the winter. It is intended for Recreational Vehicles (aka "Land Yachts"), and we placed it up on the flybridge where it has a clear view of the sky. It is self aligning, and it greatly expands our TV channels. It would not work while the boat is underway, but we are too busy running the boat to watch TV anyway. The boat moves around a little while tied to a dock, but in spite of this motion, the dish works very well. We already had web based options like Net Flick and over the air local channels. Soooo, bad weather is not a problem, especially with free wifi at most marinas.

BIG NEWS! Lucky Us restarts the Great Loop...

Our last post was on Day 136 just after we had arrived in Wilmington, NC in late September. We spent about a month in Wilmington getting Lucky Us ready for winter. Then we headed home for some serious Grandkid time! We chose Wilmington because it was about as far north that we could go and still leave the boat in the water over the winter. The boat celebrates her 30th birthday this year, and I am almost positive that she has never been up north for a winter.  The decks are a composite of wood encapsulated in fiberglass. The teak decks are screwed into the fiberglass and wood as well as numerous stainless steel deck fittings. The result is "lots" of water inside the wood.  If it were to freeze, we could have some serious damage... We also had to prepare the boat for hurricane season, which meant removing the canvass enclosure, chairs, etc. Also, I flew home and drove my truck back to Wilmington along with the dinghy trailer. We also took home some of the more expensive (and portable) electronics.

Don't get me wrong. This 4 week period was not all work. We enjoyed getting to know Wilmington.

 The historic downtown area is along the Cape Fear River, and it is about 25 miles upstream from the Atlantic Ocean, which makes the Cape Fear Marina a good "hurricane hole". That is boater jargon for a relatively safe place for your boat during a hurricane.

We arrived back in Wilmington about a month ago on February 26 with the dingy in tow. We spent the last 4 weeks reversing the process from last fall. We also had the boat pulled out of the water to have her bottom cleaned and three seacocks replaced. Actually, one was permanently removed and fiber glassed over. I also drove the truck and trailer home, and then I flew back to Wilmington.

As you know, spring in North America is late this year! However, we finally left Wilmington this morning to restart our voyage around the Great Loop. Last year we covered 2519 miles from home to Wilmington in 134 days. We still have about 5000 miles before we get back home so it will be a busy year. The pictures were taken this morning as we departed. They show the battleship North Carolina (first picture), which is permanently moored across the river from downtown Wilmington (second picture). The weather was near perfect with scattered clouds and a high temperature in the upper 60s.

Tonight, we are docked in Wrightsville Beach, NC. Our voyage for today was about 32.7 miles, but we are docked only about 8 miles as the crow flies from where we were docked last night in Wilmington. Sounds crazy, but we had to go back south down the Cape Fear River then cut across to the east to join the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Only then could we actually head north to Wrightsville Beach.

Our plan over the next 2 months is to slowly cruise up the east coast arriving in New York City about Memorial Day (May 30), and then we plan to spend the summer on the Great Lakes. About Labor Day (early September), we will cruise through downtown Chicago and head south to return home via the river systems.

We got here a little before Noon (third picture). What did we do to celebrate? Well, we each took short naps. Then the Admiral went a half mile to a hardware store for some parts. I replaced a leaking elbow in the CPVC water pipe for the shower, and Terry replaced some of the water hose for the ice maker and added a filter and drain valve. Doesn't sound like much of a celebration does it?  Well, we did go out for a VERY nice dinner at a waterfront restaurant next to our marina! See! We do remember how to celebrate!

Stay tuned as our adventure unfolds. I plan to post at least on every travel day. Speaking of travel days, we may remain in Wrightsville for 2 more days as the chances of rain are pretty high. So much for a fast start...