Raven's Cruise Log: One of those days when it all goes wrong...

Below is the log I wrote just before we came in to the New Bern Grand Marina, plugged into some very welcome A/C and started a nice two-week rest, filled with old friends. Fortunately, days like the one I detail below are not that common!

[Hilde’s log]

As I write this, we are at anchor under driving rain in Goose Creek, about seven miles from New Bern where we have a slip a week from now. We are desperately hoping they can squeeze us in earlier. We have enough food for a day before we started eating really weird combinations of things, and I have no more clean underwear. It’s getting urgent.

It's always a good idea to avoid expectations when you travel, and that rule holds true even more so when you are cruising. However, when I've been out 12 days and am hot and sticky and smelly, I tend to romanticize coming ashore. I have visions of hot showers, food I did not cook, a dry boat, and maybe a bit of conversation with other boaters over a hot cup of something.

I certainly had all these expectations for our planned stop at Oriental, a tiny town on the banks of the Neuse River, well known among boaters in this area. We met some nice folks in Georgetown who waxed lyrical about the free town docks we could tie up to for 48 hours, and get water and a pumpout. We were looking forward to connecting with them again, and looking forward to those services. Our cruising book advised that we could anchor out if the docks were full. No problem!

This morning, all looked promising. The NOAA forecast was for thunderstorms in the afternoon, and we certainly didn’t want to cross the Neuse River in that. The Neuse is extremely wide, and is more like a bay than a river. The fetch is long and when the wind blows, it can work itself up into quite a froth.

So about 8 a.m. we pulled out of our anchorage at Cedar Creek and eased into the channel. Unlike in Texas, thunderstorms in this part of the world can lower the overall temperature about 15 degrees. Because we’d had rain all day yesterday, it was downright chilly, and as we began our crossing the wind piped up and it was downright cold. The waves were all over the place, and Raven bucked along throwing spray to one side and then the next. No problem! We were only an hour from civilization and hot coffee at The Bean (a local coffee shop we visited once, many moons ago, by car).

Well. We did get there in an hour, only to discover that the “free town docks” we’d been told about were at the end of a long, narrow channel and were occupied; docks to the right of us hosted a boat that had taken the “middle half” and left no room for us. Other possible places to anchor were very shallow or had been taken over by new dockage. If you draw 5’ or more, do not plan to anchor in Oriental. Ok, problem.

After our aborted attempt to anchor in shallow water, David went below to start the washdown pump to wash off the mucky anchor and chain (the switch is in the head). To his extreme frustration, he discovered the door to the head had locked itself (because I had inadvertently bumped the lock in our lumpy crossing). Dangling her mucky anchor and chain, Raven waddled over to the main channel and we dropped the muddy hook a second time. David went below to dismantle the door lock (read: take the lock completely off the door). Meantime, as he steamed and banged around below searching for tools and trying to see what he was doing, a small skiff with two older men motored by, pulling a fishing net, and the older of the two, a prune-faced fellow whose wife is no doubt thrilled that he spends all his time wandering around the creek, yelled at us to “Get out of the channel!”

So much for the "friendly" part of my daydream. Sheesh.

On top of all the rest, there is no T-Mobile phone service in Oriental, so any hope of getting weather or any other information we needed was quashed.

Once the door lock was removed and the anchor chain washed and in its locker, we “turned on our heel” and motored back out into the river. So much for daydreams of friendly, quaint little villages and hot coffee and showers and potato chips (that last is especially painful).

Cold, smelly, tired, frustrated, and chipless, we turned north and huffed our way up the river for about four hours, pulling into Goose Creek in the middle of one of those thunderstorms I wanted to avoid. We just caught the edge of it before setting the hook and diving below, getting drenched in the process. Shedding wet clothes, we have applied baby powder to our bodies and are drinking tea and have not been electrocuted, so I guess all is well that ends well.

[Here are photos we took of our anchorage, which we would have missed altogether if Oriental had worked out. Far better than my feeble daydreams!]