Recovery, Shower, Legal Unsubtleties

I’ll admit, after our little jaunt on the ocean complete with wind-storm/coast guard/general worry about personal safety-adventure, returning back to the norm (especially in retrospective writing) is a tricky transition.  Even at the time, there was a sense (for me) of “something has changed” and it needed to be respected.

Sort of like the morning after an epic night of partying, like you can’t really believe things could go back to normal.  I don’t know if it was made clear in the last post, but we narrowly escaped a really sad(and stupid) ending to the adventure, and I don’t know if it was luck, or that we didn’t need to be worried in the first place, or what- I guess I feel like I need more stormy experiences at sea before deciding if I had the right to be terrified. 

Honestly when I thought about it when we were out there in the dark and heavy seas, it was a lot simpler to dwell on how exhausted I was, or nauseous, or that all my stuff I had spent months finding the utilitarian place for was all on the floor…  So that pretty well covers the topic of if I was scared… if I did get scared I just thought about how irritating it was, and sort of forget fear as an option.  Cheers, way to deal with reality.

Thursday, the 23^rd of February:

What ended up being our "Safe Port" after the sea adventure- the slip was a bit shallow at low tide but was nonetheless a welcome respite from the sea.

Well, reality is what we tried to avoid the following day.  We were back at “The Hotel” in Beaufort NC and picking up the pieces (literally) and putting the boat back together, while making tea, and avoiding the marina staff.  Turns out “The Hotel” was a marina attached to a condo complex, and all the old people were complaining about us just being there and reporting us to the dock master anyway… a very nice guy who had no problem letting us spend the day there before starting to charge for dockage.  So that gave us most of a day to recuperate, shower, fix up the rigging, take a good look at the engine and our surroundings before moving on in search of a mechanic.

I spent a fair chunk of time taping up the page from the chart book, which was in tatters (see image in previous post), and hanging it in the head to dry.  I was going to need to continue using it when it was time for me to depart however far away that might be.  

Meanwhile, we got to take showers, quite the amazing experience after our endeavor (and it had been a couple of days- since New Bern, I think).  We were also marooned in fog… so we needed to wait for that to clear before pulling out and finding a place that could help with our engine trouble.  I even got a little work done with what was left of the battery on my laptop and phone.

Then we set out for town on foot.  “The Hotel” was on an island almost entirely alone, and we had to walk a few miles to actually get into Beaufort:

As much fun as can be made of this sign, it's really quite nice, and so was Historic Beaufort...

... which is apparently the third oldest “Towne” in North Carolina, and I’m still trying to figure out if that is actually a distinction… but I guess it’s enough of one to excuse Old English spelling.  It was a pleasant walk that felt like solid ground, which was probably the best part.

But normalcy wouldn’t last forever, because the tide was coming back in (thus lifting the boat off the bottom so we could depart) and we needed to get the boat somewhere with a mechanic.  The fog had lifted by the time we got back to the boat and so we wrapped up and pulled away from “The Hotel”.  The wind was sufficiently strong enough to get us most of the way to a marina we had picked out for having a mechanic. For the record, it was listed on a map we had gotten from the Three Blind Mice.  In fact the wind was quite forceful and although we didn’t have far to go I was getting increasingly worried about docking in the dark in that kind of wind.  What made it worse was that the marina was barely illuminated at all, and I had to get pretty close before I could tell where I was going to enter the dock.  I chose a slip on the end to ensure I wasn’t going to run aground which would have been particularly unpleasant without a reliable engine in a dim marina with the wind getting stronger by the minute in a shipping port.

We did manage to slip in like we were drunkenly parallel parking, using a post on the starboard side to sort of violently guide us into the slip.  Then we celebrated with food and drink, and pictures because we had yet again (however briefly) braved the water and wind again with faulty equipment, too little experience, on a deadline:

Food, drink, and music to forget our troubles...

The spectacular view from the hatch

That really big boat from an earlier post, and a bridge

Friday, the 24^th of February:

… only to wake up the next morning to the bitter disappointment that we were trespassing and didn’t know it.  Turns out there was a huge “No Trespassing” sign attached to a post on the next slip down, that was probably there the night before, in concentrating on docking in wind I neglected to read on arrival.

In the darkness we had pulled into a private yacht club, the kind were outsiders are unwelcome, apparently regardless of the condition the craft is in (engineless) or how tired and irrational the crew.  (In my defense the marina was very poorly lit...?)

The club president ducked his “real job” in order to come out and deal with us troublemakers with ample threats of legal prosecution if we didn’t get the boat out of there.  Oh, and the wind had only gotten worse due to another wind storm coming in to attempt to break our well-intentioned spirits.

So there we were, stranded where we were unwelcome, nary a mechanic in sight and trespassing charges dangling over our heads.  Jail time has always been well within the realm of possibility in every adventure; almost expected really, knowing my luck and my way of doing things.  But I was expecting it would at least be in another country, like Cuba, for not respecting local visa laws or something- or for a mistaken case of identity in a mugging or bar fight in Italy.  Not for trespassing at a yacht club in the welcoming southern “towne” of Beaufort NC.

Had the wind been lighter, I would have tried sailing away.  But it was time to get the engine fixed.  We definitely couldn’t keep hoping it would hold out and that we’d keep getting it to run for 5 minutes when we needed it most before dying again.  Especially in building storm conditions.  So if I had to get the boat towed, then I needed to find a place where the cops weren’t waiting for me with open handcuffs, especially for trespassing, weak…

So I called in these guys:

Boat U.S.- I signed up for a membership and the nice young guy politely towed and listened without too much judgement as I tried to salvage some dignity by describing our predicament- the whole way round the island to Town Creek Marina where there was a fully outfitted boat mechanic department.