Day One

Our anchorage at South River, looking back toward the Neuse. So quiet! One of our favorite places.

June 1, 2019

Dear Lord, what a year. We have travelled extensively by car and by plane (from New Bern to Texas, from New Bern to England, from England to Germany, from New Bern to Tennessee). We have been at the dock for far, far too long. We have wrestled with medical issues, doctors’ appointments, and endless trips to Walmart. We have been plagued the last month with hordes of weird, non-biting mosquitoes that die on deck by the thousands (hundreds of thousands) and by the spiders that have grown fat and far, far too large by eating only some of the mosquitoes. The weather has been cold for too long, and is now hot. Really hot. 98. No wind. Hot. Time to leave. Past time. A break in the heat forecast for Friday, May 31. That’s the date for pulling out.

Amid the usual last minute this, that, and the other, Raven finally left the dock at 9:15 a.m. Friends on the dock helped guide her out of the slip in a light wind (Raven loves to be contrary when backing – with their help, we actually went forward down the fairway). The sun sparkled on the water, the warm breeze sighed over the deck, and the sky shone blue and clear. We rumbled along under power for about 45 minutes and then hoisted sail. It’s a lovely moment when the sails catch and the growl of the motor is replaced by the swish of the wind and the swirl of the water along the hull.

Spotty wind swelled to ten or eleven knots and then died off to five or six knots, swelling and ebbing as we coasted down the Neuse River. Raven sails well with ten knots or more; in the lulls we just drifted along watching the bubbles in the water go by. Not in a hurry, we just lay back and watched the shoreline slide by (at 2.5 knots, it slid by very, very slowly).

The entertainment consisted of periodically sighting and squashing our stowaway spiders. I am the sort of person who captures spiders that wander into my dwelling and deposits them outside. After all, they perform a valuable service. But our plague of mosquitoes had fed the spider population until it was completely out of control. We must have had 100 spiders when we left the dock and their webs were everywhere, encrusted with uneaten mosquitoes. Spiders pirouetted from the rigging, swung down in our faces on their webs from the bimini, fell out of the sails, galloped across the deck, and tried more than once to cuddle down our necks. Enough already. Splat. Their bodies and the bodies of literally thousands of dead mosquitoes that carpeted Raven’s decks made us determined to hose down the deck with the washdown pump as soon as we were safe at anchor. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary.

At the helm, I noticed the sky going awfully dark and took off my sunglasses. Sure enough, in front of us were a lot of gray curtains of rain falling in the distance. A look at the radar showed the showers (and a few alarming thuds of thunder) moving off to starboard, so I held course and hoped we’d skirt the worst of it. The weather cell was moving starboard, but also curving around toward us. David made the call to haul in the sails, due to fears of heavy gusts of wind. Under power, we chugged forward into some rain and winds of 15-22 knots. Not bad, all in all.

Then I looked behind me. Bad move. A very dark horizon loomed behind us and it was no great calculation to realize that with winds of 18 knots, it was going to catch us. It did!

Oops.

David shrugged into his waterproof jacket and I surrendered the wheel to him to go find my own. By the time I climbed back into the cockpit, the rain was lashing the boat sideways, the winds roared around us at a steady 30 knots, and the river was in 3-4’ chop. Basically, it blew like stink, drenched us to the bone, and hurled us across waves you expect to see in the ocean. Raven, of course, was completely unfazed (it helped that David was at the helm, guiding her through the water), shouldering aside the water and ignoring the 40 knot gusts that tried to push her off course.

The storm bludgeoned by fairly swiftly (an hour?) and, weirdly, David and I had a great time. Not for one moment were we scared, which probably goes to show our synapses are not all firing. Neither of us thought to put on our foulies, even though we had plenty of time between the time we saw the storm coming and the time it hit. Neither of us thought about life jackets until about 30 minutes into it, when I thought, “Oh, I guess I should put on a life jacket.”

I thought about the first thunderstorm we encountered 12 years ago, on our first trip, and how absolutely petrified I was, just rigid with fear. I guess I’m an old salt now. Emphasis on old.

We dropped the hook in South River about 5 p.m. The storm had rumbled off toward Pamlico Sound, on the other side of the Neuse from us, so anchoring was easy and mostly dry. I shucked off all my clothes in the cockpit, as I had no desire to dribble around below leaving puddles. We were both tired, especially David after an hour of manhandling the boat, so we just sort of lay around glassy-eyed.

I went to bed about seven, I think, and conked out shortly thereafter.

BAM! I shot out of the v-berth like a scalded cat. Lightening was crashing everywhere around us, illuminating the dark cabin like a strobe. Flash, blinding flash, CRASH, flash, BOOM. The thunderstorm was right on top of us. David stood, peering out the portholes, as the lightening pulsed through the sky above and around us. I huddled on the settee, counting seconds to see how far away the lightening was (5 miles? 3 miles? Too close!). As it began to move away, we just sat, stunned. Sleep was not an option, so we shared a cup of tea and gaped at each other. Weather in a house is just weather. Weather at anchor is an event.

As David said, grinning, “Day One.”