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.

On the road again, sorta

[Hilde's log from December 5, 2007]

Ahoy, y’all. I’m sitting at the nav station aboard Raven enjoying a couple of days of R & R at anchor in Pipeline Canal, a small anchorage just to the west of Southport, NC, off the Inter Coastal Waterway (ICW). For those of you who don’t know, David and I have failed miserably to adapt to land life and have once again set off on Raven, this time heading south. We are aiming for St. Augustine, FL for Christmas, and after that will take a big breath and plunge eastward to the Bahamas. It’s not a new voyage for Raven, who spent three years in the Bahamas and Caribbean with her previous owner, but it’s a new trip for us. David bare boated in the BVIs in the 80s; I’ve never been to that part of the world at all.

One lure is the warmth – neither of us was looking forward to another winter on Raven in northern climes. When the weather is mild, you can sit out in the cockpit or on the cabin roof, you can read or do chores or wander around town if you feel like it. But when the wind pipes up and frosts your nose, you tend to become a badger, burrowing down in the cabin for warmth. Cozy as a badger hole is, it’s also dark, small, and claustrophobic after a few days.

When you’re underway, the cabin is just cozy and a welcome shelter after several hours at the wheel. Unlike some boaters, we have no enclosure for the cockpit, so when it’s cold, our noses turn bright red, our eyes water, and we drink gallons of hot tea. We also wear layers and layers and layers, and look a little bit like Robbie, Ralph’s younger brother in A Christmas Story, who looked like the Michelin man in his snow suit and couldn’t get up if he fell down. I routinely wear 5 layers on my torso, 4 layers on my legs, and a couple of hats, rubber boots, etc. If I ever took my hats off, I’d probably be appalled by “hat head” but they only come off when I wash my hair!

David bought a little propane heater before we left New Bern, and it keeps the cabin tolerable at night. We turn it off when we go to bed and the temperature drops rapidly. Schnitzel is curled up on the settee in her dog bed, wearing a sweater and covered in her blanket and often my jacket. David and I crawl into the v-berth on top of memory foam (ahhhh) and under a light blanket and our trusty sleeping bag, opened to make a full sized cover. We take with us a hot water bottle that toasts our feet. It gradually makes its way north to my stomach and keeps us warm all night. Our breaths frost the air in the morning, and David bravely makes a run for the propane heater to take the ice out of the air in the morning. We’re the comic sight, holding our clothes over the heater to warm them up as we wrap up for the coming day. As I said, warmth is a real draw!

This is the 6th day since we left New Bern on November 30th. We’ve wandered down the ICW the entire way, traveling through some beautiful marshland, large rivers, and narrow, shallow channels lined with houses. Those last are a bit like sailing down a city street and certainly aren’t my favorite byways. I was actually grateful for the military at Camp LeJeune because the land there is left wild and undeveloped, a peaceful and beautiful passage of marshland, scrubby shrubs and tall pines, lined by sandy banks and punctuated with big grey herons who hunch on the sand and look into the water, considering the possibility of breakfast. Of course occasionally the military is shooting the place up on maneuvers but they are kind enough to post that kind of activity and fortunately they were standing down as we passed.

We pulled in here to get out of the 25-30 knot winds (although we did get in some great sailing coming down the Cape Fear River) and the choppy waters. We’re trying to take it easy as we wander southward, and to rest a couple of days a week at a conducive anchorage. Tomorrow we up anchor and head for South Carolina, which I hope is at least 5 degrees warmer. It was actually quite nice this morning, and I sat out on deck for about an hour, putting another coat of teak oil on the port toe rail. We enjoyed a dinghy into land and a longish walk, with Schnitzel even getting to run off leash. But then the temperature took a dive, so I came in and made a casserole to heat up the boat and my guess is we’ll pass the afternoon reading, knitting, chart-plotting, and washing up (always washing up).