Glorious Summer v Too Many People

[Hilde's log]

The unparalled beauty of the Waccamaw River in summer

Being of the opinion that there is just so much natural beauty a person can stand, we have decided to enjoy civilization here at Wrightsville Beach for a couple of days. Just a barrier island away from the Atlantic, Wrightsville Beach is one of the vacation destinations here in North Carolina. After a week of soggy, stormy weather, we have been blessed with blue skies, dry air, and cool temperatures for the last two days. Both sides of the waterway and the Atlantic beach are lined with vacation homes and rentals full of happy vacationers, and the waterway bustles with watercraft of all kinds.

This afternoon we spent a delightful hour or so watching a sailing class made up of four optimist prams, two lasers, and a sunfish, with kids from age 8 to about 14 skimming across the anchorage, just off Raven’s port side, tacking, jibing, racing, and occasionally turning over their boats. They were having a blast. What a great experience and what a confidence builder! 

Watch the kids! 

The colored sail is the Sunfish, the boxy little boats are the Optimist Prams, and the other two flat boats are lasers. David used to sail lasers and really enjoyed the show!

We had a ringside seat for the races. Watch the video above for the action!

The trip up from Georgetown, SC took us up a path we traveled down in the dead of winter ten years ago. I must say, I like the summer better! For better or worse, so do the inhabitants of North and South Carolina, who flocked to the coast this past weekend by the thousands. We were swarmed with jet skis, fishing boats, air boats, trawlers, power boats...all going along as fast as they could, swamping us with wake. We saw about three sailboats along the way. Probably everyone else headed for the Atlantic and sailed up on the outside.

After a particularly irksome afternoon at a beautiful anchorage beside the Waccamaw River, where a power boat with two middle aged people dropped the hook near us, cranked up their loudspeakers to earsplitting volume, and capped off three hours of togetherness by prancing about on the deck shrieking along to their favorite tunes before weaving away in the dusk, and after a long, hard day coming up the Waccamaw River through Myrtle Beach dodging hundreds of watercraft and suffocating from waterside development, we almost bailed out to the ocean ourselves. In fact, we got rigged to do just that, but a look at the map showed that we would have to backtrack almost a day to avoid troublesome shallows near the coat. So we took a deep breath and kept on going. Fortunately today is a weekday, so a lot (by no means all) of the rowdy vacationers have gone home.

Our anchorage, without the sound effects.

We spent last night in Pipeline Canal, where we spent a very cold week in December a decade ago. Like everything else, it improves in the summer. It’s a very shallow anchorage, though, really only easily accessible at high tide. We left as the tide was rising, but David still had to power through the soft mud through 4 and 5 foot depths (we draw 5 feet). Fortunately, the ground was soft. In fact, it’s kind of like tar. I remember we had a hard time getting the anchor set that week in December – we literally had to reset it about four times. I guess the “tar” gets hard in the winter. Yuck.

Pipeline Creek, in the early hours of the morning.

Pipeline Canal is just south of Southport, NC, which looks like a lovely place from the water. Hopefully we will stop there for a week on our way back south later in the summer.

The next couple of hours we spent on the Cape Fear River. A strong current kept us moving against a brisk wind, a combination sure to churn up the water. The good news was the 40 foot depth. I get tired of watching the depth meter…

We did have to dodge a couple of car ferries (above) and a barge tow, but otherwise it was just us and the wind. So cool!!

Braving another bevy of water-born vacationers along the coast, we dropped the hook here at Wrightsville Beach, where, rumor has it, there is a grocery and a seafood market not too far away.

Wrightsville Beach anchorage.