Saturday, October 17th (Day 19)
Air temp 62, water temp 69, winds NE @ 15
We were off the dock at 7:30am to continue our trip south. It was a pretty morning but a little windier then expected. In fact, the forecast had changed and the winds was going to stay high at 15-20 knots from the NE all day. We decided to go anyway and maybe the wind would help us along the more open sections. Pretty sunrise as we were leaving.
There are two bridges that need to open for us in the first couple hours. First was the Centerville Swing Bridge. On the weekends, this bridge was not on a schedule - they were on-request. As we approached, I called the bridge on VHF channel 13 and they opened right as we got there. Now I had a slight problem. The North Landing bridge was only about 4.5 miles away and only opened on the hour and 1/2 hour. It was 7:52am when we passed through the Centerville Bridge. I knew we would not be able to motor 4.5 miles in 38 minutes so we slowed to a crawl (<>4 knots) in order to time our arrival for their 9am opening. If we had left only 10 minutes earlier, we could have saved 1/2 hour. Oh well. You never know about these things. The first bridge could have been slower to open and delayed us anyway. Such is life.
No problems as we passed through the North Landing Bridge at 9am. There were two trawlers that had caught us before the bridge so I pulled over and let them pass us slowly. Now we were free to the Alligator River Bridge in about 60 miles. We planned on this one tomorrow morning.
We motored through the twisty ICW until a few hours later when we entered Currituck Sound. This is a long straight-away so we rolled out the jib to help our speed. The boat ran 6.5 to 7 knots with lower engine RPM almost all the way to Coinjocks. You have to be careful along this section because the deep channel is narrow. If you drift more than a couple boat lengths to either side, you will hit bottom. Plus, the wind was a little gusty so, every once in a while, it tried to turn the boat. Pay attention! Laura took this video of sailing down Currituck Sound.
We approached our normal anchorage on the north end of the North River and it was only 2pm. Even though the wind was still around 20 knots, I didn't think the Albemarle Sound would be too bad because the winds and seas would be from directly behind us. We decided to "stick our nose out" onto Albemarle Sound and turn west to anchor along the windward shore if the seas were too bad.
Turns out the seas were only about 1 foot and the wind kept our speed up to 7+ knots with low engine RPM. This would have been a great time to sail across but the winds were directly behind us. If we fell off 40-50 degrees to run a broad reach with main and jib, I figured it would be dark before we anchored on the other side of the Alligator River Bridge. So, we just kept the jib pulling hard and low engine RPM which made for a nice ride across the 13 miles of open water.
We sailed through the Alligator River Bridge at 5:45pm then hugged the eastern shore for about 45 minutes until we got into a little bay that offered some protection from the wind and seas. It was very calm in there so we anchored about 1/8 mile from shore (as shown by our RADAR).
The Alligator River is notorious for stumps and snags in the bottom. I could see stumps and branches in the water closer to shore but nothing around us. We dropped our anchor in 9 feet of water and let out 70 feet of chain. Keep in mind our anchor roller is almost 6 feet off the water so that makes the dept calculation 15 feet. Here was our sunset just after anchoring.
We spent a calm evening and were even able to watch a few episodes of our new (to us) series "Man with a Plan" on Netflix staring Matt LeBlanc (Joey from Friends). It's a fun show.
67 nautical miles today in 11 hours. 577 total miles from Catskill
Sunday, October 18th (Day 20)
This morning I spent a little time troubleshooting our Electro Scan waste treatment system which was display an error and not working. I check for loose wires and blown fuses but everything looked OK. Guess I will need to keep working on this. Here was the sunrise from this morning.
We pulled our anchor at 8:30am. While I was pulling in the chain, it would pull the boat in one direction then seem to catch and pull in a slightly different direction. I was a little worried that the chain was catching on stumps or other stuff on the bottom. When we got directly over the anchor, the windlass stopped and the anchor wouldn't budge. Oh oh. I kept pulling in a few inches at a time and finally the anchor came loose but it was like the windlass was pulling up 100 feet of chain instead of 9. When the anchor finally came out of the water, it had a large stump attached. A little jiggle of the windlass up-and-down then the stump fell off to snag the next unfortunate boat to anchor here. We turned and headed back to the ICW channel.
Yesterday, I thought the traffic on the ICW was pretty light. I wasn't sure if it was because we were a few weeks earlier than normal or maybe the COVID was keeping people from traveling. Turns out both were wrong - it was the high winds. Today, everyone was underway and we were passed by over 30 powerboats during the morning.
A few hours later we entered the Alligator - Pungo Canal. This is a 22 miles stretch of narrow canal with visible tree stumps on both sides. It is my least favorite part of the whole trip. 3.5 - 4 hours of trying to keep the boat in the middle plus getting passed by many powerboats and a few sailboats. There are no tides in this whole section because it is a large area with only limited ocean access. Instead, the water levels change depending on the wind and air pressure. This means you never know what the currents are going to be in the canal and today they were against us. It started at about 1/2 knot and was over 1 knot by the time we excited onto the Pungo River. This made for an even slower trip than normal.
As we turned south down the Pungo River near Belhaven, the winds were 6-7 knots on our beam. We rolled out the full jib and mainsail which kept our speed around 7 knots. We decided to keep going and anchor somewhere off Goose Creek across the Pamlico River.
We found an excellent anchorage in Eastham Creek near Good Creek Island about 1/2 mile from the ICW which would cut down on early morning powerboat wakes. We dropped anchor at 6:15pm. Another long day with 56 nautical miles - about 1/2 of it through the slow Alligator-Pungo Canal. Pretty sunset tonight.
Monday, October 19th (Day 21)
It was a beautiful morning in our calm anchorage so we took our time and pulled the ancor at 9:15am. Since we had really booked the past few days, today would be short at only about 30 miles to the marina we had reserved for some work on the boat.
Winds helped most of the day and we sailed for about an hour down the Neuse River before the winds died to less than 10 knots. We continued on past Oriental toward New Bern and into new waters for us. Here is a picture of us sailing down the Neuse. Watch out! Don't fall over!
Laura also took this nice video of the sail.
6 miles past Oriental is Wayfarers Marina. They have a wood shop and carpenter that was recommended to us by our friends D and Don who are also cruisers but have a house in Oriental. I talked to the manager Tom on the phone and he gave me detailed directions entering the channel and finding our slip. I guess I didn't follow them close enough because we ran aground right between the #2 and #4 channel markers. I was going pretty slow because it was shallow and we were able to motor through the soft bottom to the red side of the channel which was deeper. No problems the rest of the way in and we tied up to our assigned slip at 2:45pm.
Every trip up and down the coast I try to see how long I can make it before going aground somewhere. In 2014 I made it all the way from Catskill to Marathon without touching bottom - that was the only time in 30 trips. We must have only stayed in known places that trip. This time I had made it a little over 700 miles. When I travel through new places, especially in NC, I go very slow and try to "feel my way" into shallow areas. Sometimes, it takes rubbing bottom to find the best channels. You just have to go slow enough that you can back up and try another direction. Thankfully, the bottom around this area was very muddy and soft which making backing out a little easier. Doing the math here you can see we've run aground at least 29 times in the past 14 years. How many times have I had to call a tow-boat to help us get free? Only once in Lake Sylvia, Ft. Lauderdale. That was a hard rock bottom. The boat didn't plow slowly into it like mud. It bounced up on top and I couldn't even turn the boat around with full throttle and full rudder. Ok. Enough on that subject for now except to say there is a great song by Eric Stone called "If you ain't been aground, you ain't been around".
The slips in this marina have two pilings on each side and a short dock near the bow. As I pulled the boat into the slip, it was a totally different tie up than I had ever seen before. Laura asked me what to do and I told her to just get a line on something. We ended up yelling a bit at each other - I think because we both were frustrated with this dock. I hate it when people yell on their boat and hate it even more when I yell. It took us over 1/2 hour to get everything and the lines where I liked them. Here we are tied up safe and sound.
We took a walk around the marina which is a huge boatyard with 100s of boats "on the hard". A major problem for us is very limited AT&T access on our phones and no wi-fi. It sucks being out of touch.
Tuesday, October 20th (Day 22 - Start of week4)
I slept in a bit today (a little too much red wine last night) and didn't get up until almost 9am. After a quick breakfast, the carpenter came over to look at the work we wanted done. One of our cockpit drains had leaked for several years over the ceiling near our workbench. About a year ago I saw the wet, rotted wood and cut out part of the ceiling plywood to find the leak. I fixed the leaking hose fitting but left the rotted bulkhead, ceiling and wall for another day. Laura and I are ok with wood but we are not carpenters. This needed more expertise than we had. Laura checked around with friends and found this carpenter near Oriental. Let's get-er-done!
We had pulled off all the molding and moved our stuff out of the way last night. Eric showed up with an assistant and looked everything over closely. He estimated 2 days for the repair and around $1,800 including time and materials. He said he could start on Thursday. Great!
After they left, Laura played her Dolcimer for a while and I played my flute for a bit in the cockpit.
In the afternoon, we walked around a bit and found a nice beach only a short distance from the marina. Laura was back in her element....
We will be here for about a week to get the carpentry work done and a few other projects. Plus, after the carpentry work, we will be installing 3 new Portlights over the new walls. That might take us a few days. Southern Cross is also here but hauled out of the water. D and Don are on a car trip to Ohio. They may be returning next Sunday so we will get a few days together. Laura and I are looking forward to that.
Here are a couple more pictures of Wayfarers Marina. The first is the entrance channel.
Past this breakwater the narrow channel turns 90 degrees to port and you can see the harbor. Second Wind is way down the other end around the corner. This is a big marina!
Sorry if you don't see all the picture or videos. Not sure why they don't all show up. It seems to be worse if you follow this blog on a phone. You can always watch our videos from our YouTube page HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment