A Pause in the Action

[Hilde's log]

We’ve been at the dock in New Bern, North Carolina, since my last post. We wondered how the area had fared in our ten year absence, and to our delight we discovered that it’s pretty much the same. New Bern is about 300 years old (founded in 1710) and maintains a vibrant and charming downtown area. Its close-in residential areas are full of beautifully kept old homes, many of which are priced so reasonably we could buy one.

 A trip down Broad Street in New Bern


New Bern sits at the junction of the Trent and Neuse Rivers, and so has a lot of beautiful waterfront and lots of area to sail when the wind is up (which it is not in July and August).

The town docks on the Neuse River, just off Union Point in New Barn. Free for 48 hours! And, unlike Oriental, you can actually get to them in a decent amount of water.

The front of the DoubleTree hotel in New Bern. The crepe myrtles are all over town, in white, pink, watermelon, and bright red! I've never seen a red crepe myrtle, but they are gorgeous. AND they don't make me sneeze.

This is a view of the waterfront on the other side of the DoubleTree hotel that faces the water. As marina residents, we are also hotel guests, and that means free coffee every morning. And hot showers. And a deck. Sweet.

A summer storm sweeps over the marina. It brought some cooler temperatures for a day or two, which was a big relief.

David and I loved it here when we lived here 10 years ago, and so we began to wonder...why not move back? We’re retired, we can get a house, the area is centrally located along the East Coast with beautiful sailing areas in close reach. What’s not to like? We even went so far as to shop for homes, looking near and far (a whole 10 miles away from downtown), at new homes and old, big and small and in-between.

A glimpse of New Bern. The bear statues (to the right in this photo) are all over town, like the pelican statues in Seabrook.

You know how things can look really, really good on paper, but they just don’t seem to work out? That has been our experience here. We couldn’t find a home that was just right, or a neighborhood that was just right, or a price that was just right. Either the house needed too much updating or it was too far from downtown or it was claustrophobic or too unique for resale or just too big to keep up and have any kind of life. It was very frustrating.

Regardless of the house, we knew we wanted to have a car. That’s one of the most frustrating aspects of cruising. When you get to shore, you are stranded in the vast majority of places. You can get to any place that’s within a couple of miles of the harbor simply by walking, or you can beg or borrow or rent a car. It can be really frustrating to run those necessary errands. So, since we had decided to stop until fall (summer here is almost as bad as summer in Houston), we needed wheels.

That was absolutely no trouble at all! We found a local Hyundai dealership and actually liked the folks working there. When has that ever been the case? Never for me. We ended up with a new 2018 Hyundai Sonata for about the same price I paid for my Acura Integra 20 years ago. No lie. I keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but so far, so good.

Check it out! Red!

In the process of buying the car, we discovered that our previous belief, that North Carolina does not tax retirement income, was incorrect. North Carolina does not tax Social Security income. It does tax IRA distributions and pensions, at 5%. Talk about a cold shower! That put a halt to looking at homes in a hurry.

So, we wondered, how to alleviate some of the more irritating aspects of living on a boat at the dock? One major irritant is feeling overcrowded. Spare parts, project supplies, winter clothes in summer, winter shoes in summer….all crowd the cupboards and lockers until I want to pull my hair out some days. That was one of the draws of a house: being able to unpack!

David fixing the A/C. He's had to fix it three times since we've been here - all sorts of vegetation floats in the water and plugs up the intake. Notice the disaster wreaked in the cabin by having to move everything from the port to the starboard side and dig out tools from the v-berth. This is the way the boat feels some days, even when it isn't a mess and why it was so very tempting to find a house to spread out in. Raven doesn't feel small on the water, only at the dock.

Since a house was out, we decided to rent a small air conditioned storage unit for the overflow. We drove out to a likely place on Sunday. It was closed...but the owner saw us in the driveway and came over to chat. Finding out what we were looking for, he told us he has one that had come vacant the day before, opened the office and signed us up. As it turned out, it was the only one that size he had vacant.

One some levels, our experience here has been a resounding “No” - as in, no house, no you aren’t going to live here. On others, the experience has been eerily easy: new car, no problems (in fact that’s what saved us from making a very expensive mistake), storage space, no problem. I get the feeling we are being gently herded...somewhere.

The current plan is to enjoy the A/C (when it is working) at the dock for July and August. In September we leave for England to visit David's mom. Then in October, when we return, we'll set off for the Chesapeake and some good sailing! Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we have been promised fireworks over the Trent River basin (just behind us in the marina) on the 4^th. I plan to sit out on the foredeck with a cold can of seltzer and enjoy the show, heat or no heat. Here’s wishing all of you a festive Fourth of July!

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!]

Our view from the Goose Creek anchorage once the rain stopped.

Sunset on Goose Creek. Dear Lord, it was beautiful!

Sunrise the next morning. Were we glad to be at anchor and not at a dock!