Bug hell, beauty heaven

(The last of three – gotta publish when I can - we'll be at this anchorage through Wednesday. The weather has kicked up.)

Going down the Alligator-Pongo River Canal.

June 9, 2019

Mosquitoes! Gnats! By the tens of thousands!! Egads!

That pretty much describes the last three anchorages (not this one, thank heaven). I have never seen so many bugs in my life. Literally (I am not exaggerating in the least) tens of thousands of bugs, carpeting every available surface, whether vertical or horizontal. Dead bugs, live bugs, dying bugs. 

The storm on the Neuse cleaned the boat of our spring’s accumulation of mosquito corpses, but that was nothing compared to this. Clouds of the little buggers have choked the sky every evening at dusk, and one way or another a lot of them have found their way inside. We’ve battened down the hatches (and portholes) but somehow they worm their way in. Fortunately the gnats died after a day and the mosquitoes aren’t overly vicious, although one hungry devil bit me multiple times on my foot as I slept and it itches like fury. It’s not just bites: they fly into your hair, under your glasses, up your shorts, and into your nose!

This morning’s crop of mosquitoes (the gnats are long gone) stuck to every conceivable surface (including the deck, the self-steering, the boom, the helm – you name it) and rode all the way across Albemarle Sound with us. As soon as we dropped the hook, David hooked up the wash down pump and sprayed the corpses overboard and the live mosquitoes into flight. The spiders have been hysterical with joy, flinging webs every which way; it was a spider bull market in bugs. We were not hysterical with joy, just hysterical.

A cool bath on the deck with the wash down pump calmed us down some. Clean hair is a wonderful thing. We were so happy the water here is fresh and not brackish. The weather is mild, the sun bright, and it’s just perfect to sit on the foredeck basking.

Other than bug wars in the dawn and the dusk, it’s been a lovely few days, motoring (no wind where you want it) and watching thunderstorms roll by and grey sheets of rain rushing up the river toward us. Crossing the Sound this morning was like sliding through liquid silver. We glided over silver water as smooth as silk, with the silver sky swirling above us. We’re in the back country, here, with no buildings, just a few other boats for company, a huge expanse of water, and a remote horizon. Mornings like this make the bugs irrelevant.

Check out this big guy - we followed this barge all one day. Can you imagine having to turn it?

A couple of days ago we saw two bald eagles! And a deer, and two buzzards, but I’m used to that. Two eagles! The trip up the Alligator River was a bit tiresome, as it’s a large body of water surrounded by scrubby bits of land. But our anchorages were beautiful and prime spots for breathing clean air, listening to frog racket, and watching the sky.

Here's a link to the canal where we saw all the wildlife (pictured above, also). The roar is "Mr. P" the engine. You go deaf after awhile.

We have a stowaway – a little tree frog. I have no idea how he came on board, but he must be really happy with all the free bug food. We are both carefully trying not to squash him. He’s hiding under the port winch handle, which is not a prime location, but I couldn’t persuade him to relocate.

June 10

We were supposed to head up the Virginia Cut today (formally known as Albemarle & Chesapeake Canal, according to our guidebook), a trip that will take about two days. On the other side of that is Norfolk and the Chesapeake and waters unknown. However, we’re just too lazy. We are floating, rocking gently in the breeze, and contemplating an afternoon beer. Yes.

Our anchorage. The speedboat is whooshing along the ICW. Its wake will reach us in a few minutes and lop us back and forth for several minutes. Sigh. Why are they in such a rush? Other than the occasional annoying boat, it's really, really quiet. Can you believe we have cell phone coverage?

Belhaven and waiting for weather

June 5, 2019

Raven is lopping in the harbor at Belhaven, NC as gusty winds and sloppy waves knock her about. It’s our second day here, stuck in harbor because we get cranky motoring into standing waves.

Days 2 and 3 of this trip were spent napping at anchor in South River. It’s so beautiful there, with just a few houses and a gravel quarry of sorts to one side of the river and endless trees on the other. After our first exciting 24 hours on this trip and the wild ride down the Neuse, we were content to watch thunderstorms rumble by on the big river and nap in the breeze funneling down the front hatchway.

A few houses on one side of South River.

On the other side...nothing (but one ghost town and a nice old spooky cemetery and lots and lots of bugs).

Restless by day 4, we upped anchor and headed north, across the Neuse. Winds of 12 and 13 knots invited us to raise the sails and enjoy the morning, which we did, but then the winds honked up to 18-20 and blew from the wrong direction and it got to be work, so we decided to motor. The wind howled right down our nose and we bucked our way across the river into three-foot standing waves that caused Raven to rear like a horse, slam down with a thud and stop, about once every five minutes. Not a calming ride, it was like dragging ourselves hand over hand at 2 knots for four hours until we were finally able to change direction and everything smoothed out. After a calm anchorage at Eastham Creek, we motored along the ICW and slid into the harbor here at Belhaven early afternoon yesterday, just in time for the wind to crank up and knock us around. NOAA forecast more of the same (20-25 knots) for the next couple of days, so we have decided to stay put.

We weren't the only ones who stopped into the harbor.

The reefing lines that David so laboriously installed in Pensacola have been nothing but a nuisance, dangling over the deck and over the bimini and trying to strangle us. Out on the river, as David was bringing in the jib, the darned thing tangled itself around the jib sheet in an actual knot. So one of his first chores was to take out two of the three reefing lines and stow them away in a locker. Some improvements aren’t.

In the morning quiet, David assembled the dinghy and we puttered into the town dock. We have plenty of supplies, but the fresh vegetables were getting pretty low and neither of us likes canned, so we went in search of a grocery. The only one here is over a mile from the dock, so we opted for the charming public library and some free wi-fi instead. They had “friends of the library” books for sale, so I had a nice browse and found several that looked good.

Beautiful downtown Belhaven. Could use some investment if you want to open a business in a lovely place.

Upon hearing that we were afoot and wanting to go to Food Lion, Shirley the Librarian (almost as good as Marian the Librarian in The Music Man) got on the phone and got us permission to use a golf cart. She then took a break and drove us down to the cart, about a quarter mile away! The friendliness and helpfulness of people we meet along the way never ceases to amaze and delight me. David fired up the cart, and we toddled off to the grocery store in the fresh air at about 15 mph. Once stocked up at the store, David dropped me and our bags at the dock, returned the cart, and walked back. By that time, the wind had swelled and the water was good and choppy. We bucked and sloshed our way back to the boat and were glad to reach the relative stability of planet Raven.

Lovely little waterfront town. Down this street is where you go to snag a golf cart.

Our three hours ashore consisted of accomplishing two errands, meeting three lovely ladies at the library, enjoying a three-mile round trip in a golf cart, and taking one moderately choppy and one really lumpy ride across the anchorage in the dinghy. It’s always a surprise at how long things take on a boat, but then we always have some sort of minor adventure, so who cares?

June 6

More waiting for weather. The wind has finally clocked around to a different direction, so we have stopped hobby-horsing. It’s supposed to be calm tomorrow, so we intend to set off early for a long (30+ mile) day. It turned hot today for the first time since we left New Bern. David has hooked up the wind scoop (imagine a kite flying from the forward hatch, acting as a wind funnel to send the breeze down into the cabin) to cool us off. We are wearing the absolute minimum of clothes and are grateful for the breeze and the shade of the cabin. A couple of shandies helped, as well. :) (To the uninitiated, “shandies” are a mixture of beer and ginger beer, served cold.)

Today’s accomplishments were making chicken salad, having a bath, and washing my hair. It’s great to feel clean and powdered and to have stuffed my wilted clothing into the laundry duffel. Baths on the boat are, by necessity, brief, using about 4 cups of water when I clean head to toe. When I was a kid, we called this sort of abbreviated wash “spit baths” because of the limited water. I spent a hot summer at our farm when I was about 12, and when the well went dry, we hauled water from the pond to flush the toilet and for baths used a tiny amount of water in a basin, filled from the big jug we bought in town. So spit baths are not new to me! I wash my hair in river water, rinsing with vinegar, and it comes out well and doesn’t use up anything from the tanks. David hooks up the wash down hose on deck and has a “shower” with the river water. This arrangement works great until it starts getting cold, at which point we tend to hunt for hot showers ashore!

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.”

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!

Summertime

[Hilde’s log]

We’re beach weanies. I’m not much on sand (it’s hard to walk through and gets everywhere) and David doesn’t like the heat. Neither of us has much urge to swim in opaque water and be nibbled by anonymous critters. So we wandered out on Wrightsville Beach, took a couple of snaps, and wandered right back into town.

Wrightsville Beach - gorgeous white sand and hot white sun.

Then we found out that the only attractions at Wrightsville Beach are the water and the beach. David solved that problem by fitting out the sailing kit for the dinghy, and we spent a couple of hours sailing up and down the anchorage. He sails; I’m ballast; we both have fun!

Sunset at Wrightsville Beach.

A long, 40-mile day found us at anchor off Camp LeJeune at Mile Hammock Bay. We were so bushed, the occasional ordnance fire didn’t keep us awake at all. Early in the morning, smoke from fires set off by the “war games” woke us. It’s a nice anchorage, despite the army activity, and it was a relief to be able to stop for the night.

Our next stop was Swansboro, where the anchorage was shallow, but gave us a good view of the town, the highway, and various restaurants. We spend three nights there. Our second day, we dinghied in for breakfast at Yanna’s, which was spilling over with customers. A walking tour of the town took up the rest of the morning. That evening we dinghied in the opposite direction and treated ourselves to a fine Mediterranean meal. 

We admired this house's beautiful garden.

One of the streets in the historic district, Swansboro.

Stormy skies over Swansboro. This one blew past us without even a sprinkle.

Swansboro - view from the water.

Here we are in the anchorage...before I ran us aground.

Our third day was not planned. As we were leaving the anchorage, I managed to ground us (again – this is my third time, I think; I am losing count) and we spend the entire frustrating day on board sweating and waiting for the shallow tide to rise and lift us off, which it did about 4 p.m. We went into the fuel dock for diesel and turned back to the anchorage for another night. Fortunately, David has a program on his phone that shows the contours of the bottom (sonar charts), so he downloaded this anchorage and we were able to leave without further ado the next morning.

The next day was another long trek, from Swansboro through Bogue Sound, past Moorehead City, and up Adams Creek. I remembered the anchorage at Moorehead City and was glad we didn’t have to stop there. It’s narrow and crowded and bad holding. We zipped past the town like a cat with its tail on fire: the current was running at 2.2+ knots with us and Raven flashed along at over 7 knots. That’s fast for us.

Underway from Swansboro under a beautiful summer sky. We have the jib out to give our speed a boost.

One of the huge working ships at the dock at Moorehead City. Check out the "little" boat (probably 20 feet long)  running along beside for a size comparison.

I love Bogue Sound. It’s a wide, wide expanse of water which is a delight in mild wind. We passed numerous pockets of tiny silver fish that flittered and leaped about on the surface of the water, creating water-borne glitter. I fantasized they were playing in the sun, but I’m pretty sure they were trying to avoid being lunch for the dolphins that surrounded us. 

Along Bogue Sound 

The sound is broken up by islands and sand bars and coves. Houses line the shores, but they are so far away it doesn’t feel crowded. We passed one couple who had pulled their runabout up on a sandbar and debarked a couple of folding chairs and two excited dogs who ran back and forth on the bar, splashing and snapping at the water. Great idea! Pull up to your own little island and let the dogs run while you read the paper.

Neither of us remembered the views on Adams Creek, except we are both pretty sure it wasn’t built up ten years ago. Now there are three story houses on both sides of the Creek for quite a way. They finally peter out near the Neuse River. Cedar Creek is just a little south of the Neuse; Oriental is just across the Neuse River.

Arriving about 4 p.m., we anchored in 7 feet of water and spent a pleasant evening watching the world chug down the ICW. Fishing trawlers motored up and down with their nets out, and at one point two barges converged, one from either end of the channel. We were very glad to be anchored and not playing tag with those behemoths. When we came in, a lone catamaran was anchored near the shore. One other sailboat came in about an hour after we arrived, and then all was quiet.

Nose to nose barges on the ICW off Cedar Creek.

We ended up sharing space with an entire commercial fishing fleet. They were the fishing trawlers we had been watching - seven boats that went in and out of their marina all afternoon and well into the evening, followed by a cloud of squawking gulls. In addition to the lone sailboat that anchored near us, the morning light revealed four more sailboats rafted up near us, flags flying gaily in the breeze. They took off later in the morning, but were replaced in the rainy afternoon by another three sailboats and a catamaran. We saw more sailboats at Cedar Creek than we’ve seen in the last two months!

We broke out the dinghy again and sailed all over the little bay. About eleven a.m. we heard thunder, and about noon a huge mass of black clouds appeared and roared through the anchorage bringing heavy rain and blessedly cool temperatures. The storm whooshed past, but left gray skies and constant rain for the rest of the day. It was a blessing – it was finally cool enough for me to cook something in the galley.

Rainy day on Cedar Creek.

It feels good to be back in North Carolina. It’s like East Texas with a lot of water. A lot of water. Last night I lay awake and listened to whip-poor-wills call in the trees; the air smells like wet pines. I am excited to be on the way to Oriental for a few days and then on to New Bern. We lived in New Bern for a year and we are both anxious to see how it has fared and whether we still feel at home there.

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.