Saturday May 4: Carolina Beach State Park, NC

What a difference from the Waccamaw River! We're now toward the northern end of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.

The choice today to travel the 14 miles up the Cape Fear River was pretty easy: fight the 2+ mph current and 20 mph winds or having the current going our way but the winds against us - producing some very nasty waves on this large river. Easy - fight the current and the wind.

It was an interesting trip and the docking was even more interesting with the winds and gusts. But as you can see we are tied up nicely to the park dock :-)

The view from the flybridge for the last couple of days has been rather boring - just a bunch of rain drops on the front plastic!

It's still cold travel and yesterday's squall was probably one of the worst we were in for a long time - very windy and rainy with gusty winds of ??

What's with this weather? It IS May after all, right?


The travel itself has actually been pretty boring - and I don't usually say that but after the tree line river, it's been a man made canal north of Myrtle Beach. From there it's mostly just a line of homes and docks along the waterway.

It's then that I started to notice the brightly colored homes - are we back in Florida? Quite surprising since I didn't realize that North Carolina was into such a variety of colors of houses.

So I just started taking pictures of the unusual ones.

Anyway, you get the idea :-)




We ended up spending Thursday night at a small marina, Coquina Marina, in North Myrtle Beach. It's a nice place and the lady that runs it is very nice and always glad to see us back. She lives on a large trawler in the marina. Her and her husband had just bought this boat and then he had a heart attack and died. Sadly they hadn't really had much of a chance to travel on it. Guess that's why we keep going while we can .....

Then last night we finally met up with Sailor Dave on Mary Lee!! The last time we saw Dave was in Oriental last fall as he was moving the boat south. He plans on being in Southport for a while yet working on building a dinghy (nesting dingy actually - it's quite interesting as one half fits inside the other half when stored. Click here to see a picture of one! The best picture is top row right.)

We really enjoyed seeing him again and it served to remind us of how fortunate we are to be able to have met such great people in our travels.

After joining us for breakfast this morning, he helped us off and off we were on our way to the Cape Fear River.

The most excitement was the freighter coming our way. I quickly moved out of the large ship channel to give it LOTS of clearance!


So now we wait for the weather to get nice again. Probably not going to happen for a few days though. May stay another day or may move on. We'll see .....

Sadly, I stepped out from behind the flybridge plastic to snap a picture of our favorite place in Southport - the Provision Company - and lost my visor to the wind. Overboard. Gone. Could have turned around but too windy to want to do that.

Guess I'll need to go to the Dolphin Research Center in Marathon to replace it!