Monday November 7: Wrightsville Beach, NC

The wind finally died off yesterday (Sunday) and we left Morehead City for a short day of 25 miles to Swansboro, NC. Fishing boats are found just about everywhere now as we are in an inland waterway that runs parallel to the coast line. So the fishing boats are well protected from the weather when in harbor yet the run to an ocean inlet is never too far away. We crossed paths with this boat just out of Morehead City. Further down the way I saw the smallest homemade fishing boat ever! It has the stabilizing arms, nets and everything but clearly seems to be a small homemade job! Maybe it is used to fish in the inland areas.

Anyway, we pulled into Dudley's Marina - which is also a gas station on land. They had a courtesy car so we headed out for a late lunch, found an auto parts store to pick up a few things we needed to finish projects and of course made a stop at the local grocery store. Clyde lives at Dudley's Marina. We learned two things about Clyde: he is as old as me (62) and he bites! Not first hand experience as we just took the word of the young gal who worked there. Our dock was being overtaken by the seagulls but no pelicans even though we now see them quite often. Dolphins have also started appearing. It's just so fun to have them back!

The battery charger job is finished up - yea!! We added a second battery to the "house batteries" which provide 12 volt power for lights and pumps as well as power to the inverter (which changes the 12 volt to 110 so we can watch tv when we don't have shore power :-)) More crawling around under the floor was involved. We'll see how that goes tomorrow when we'll be at a dock without electric tomorrow night.

It was a very pleasant day on the water today - sunny and warm. Can't believe I actually had shorts on today. This part of North Carolina waterway is VERY protected but has pretty good currents also along with 4-5 foot tides. We passed through the marine base at Camp Lejeune today. Not much air action but we saw 6 small marine go fast boats. They waved as we took their picture but I was thinking that maybe taking pictures was something we shouldn't be doing! And I finally found the yellow triangles that mark the path of the Intercoastal Waterway. Never saw them before but they are on all of the buoys that mark the ICW. Who knew!! Today was an "are we going to make the bridge" day as each opens either on the hour or on the hour and half hour. It was quite interesting at the second bridge - of course the one where the current was sucking you into the bridge at 2 mph! We were the second boat in but had to circle around to stay in a position. Three GIANT boats came up so I just circled around behind them as they were going to be going way faster than us after the bridge anyway. Not so for the catamaran. They were mad that the 3 go fast boats went around them as the cat was waiting for the bridge. So the conversation on channel 13 was this lady in the cat giving the big guys a hard time about being inconsiderate (not letting the cat know what the plan was). Of course everyone can hear her. She really needs to chill out a bit :-)

Most of the sides consist of home - some with a giant goose in the yard - and small towns along the waterway. All in all - a very nice day today of 55 miles. We'll be in South Carolina in two days. Heading south ........