Going Solo

Battered and bruised we dock at Town Creek Marina via Boat Tow

Friday, February 24^th Continued:

After arriving at Town Creek Marina we were treated with quite the opposite response as when we arrived at the private yacht club-

We had access to a courtesy car, laundry facilities, bathrooms- all the simple pleasures taken for granted until you need them and don’t have them.  We decided to ride in Ford Taurus style back into Beaufort to check out a restaurant, the first we’d been to since we started this adventure, and got to enjoy some really fresh seafood at “Finz”, a casual and seasonal local favorite that had reopened for business that very day.  After a week of only eating things that can be prepared with hot water or can opener, this meal was sublime; complete with sweet potato fries- my favorite kind of fry:

Shrimp and Crabcakes and Sweet Potato Fries...capitol!

See the satisfaction on his face!  Mine too- AWESOME!

Downtown Beaufort, NC

Some views from the boat-

Then we turned our attention to what was ailing the engine, and replaced the air filter and added some cleansing agents to the fuel.  This got us over the issue of the engine shutting off after five minutes.  We declared this a success and hoped our engine troubles were over (although skepticism still hung in the air after such minor fixes).  Unfortunately, we didn’t have a chance to move the boat and really test out the engine for all too soon Antonio would have to return to Charlotte and get back to work and the real world. hahahaha!

There's only one mast in this picture... guess who.

 Saturday February 25^th:

Naturally, since up until now we had gotten used to forced backtracking in the face of adversity, the nearest bus station where Antonio could catch a Greyhound happened to be back in New Bern… so we found ourselves back at our origin point.  "Where it all began"-  After a brief “So long”, Antonio was gone and I was driving the courtesy car back to the boat in Beaufort- and on the way I crossed over the first bridge Bernoulli went under, not nearly as spectacular a sight from inside the car. 

Driving a car again, sort of a weird feeling going so fast while doing so little (dropping Antonio off in New Bern).

The view from above the first bridge we went under on the ICW... not as cool from above-

This begs the topic of how much more you get to see when you travel by any other means than car; granted it took a few hours to cover the distance (twice) that it took two days to do in the boat.  But in that time we got to see waterfront homes on the ICW, stranded boats, dolphins, massive boat yards, bridges and shipping ports, plus tons of wonderful swampy scenery.  We got to drink wine and congratulate the owners of a freshly re-launched yacht.  We got to struggle in headwinds and walk to gas stations in the middle of the night.  That is all part of the immense fun.

I’ve been travelling solo since Antonio headed back to the real world, and I have had many adventures in that time.  But I need to take a moment and appreciate (explicitly) how much fun it is to have a companion on an epic trip like this, and especially how appreciative I am for his help and opinions in the times of trouble we shared.  Bouncing ideas back and forth on how to escape this or that mild disaster we’d gotten ourselves into was invaluable.  There were many more than got described in this blog after all.  Which also brings up the point of how a blog, by necessity, only skims the surface of what actually happens on an adventure because, simply put, readers don’t have the attention span for all the details of a great adventure.  So I recommend embarking on as ambitious an adventure you can conjure up; it’s the only way to know what really goes into such an unrivaled and idiotic pursuit, and it’s totally worth it to try.  I definitely recommend picking a travel companion carefully; the right companion will be helpful and reassure you, while I don’t even want to think of what the wrong companion might be capable of.  We only made it a tiny fraction of the distance we meant to when we set out from New Bern, and by most accounts the results would be considered an utter failure.  But I don’t consider it a failure in the least.  On the contrary, we had a really great time, and we determined by the end that we had made the right choices in the circumstances, risking as much as we were willing to, and caving to the will of nature at the right times.  The adventure is composed of the events, not simply the reaching of a predefined goal.

Cheers Antonio!  I certainly won’t forget this one anytime soon!

So Antonio was gone and got to re-enter society and could stop worrying about threatening his own life… but I was still very much at the whim of the adventure gods.  I still had many hundreds of miles to travel before reaching the first available destination where I would have a semblance of a support system, which turned out to be Beaufort SC, where my uncle and his family lives.  Also, I was now in the hitherto untested scenario of having to dock and disembark without an extra set of hands, and any mistakes to be made would be mine alone, and the only person around to help me out of tight spots would be Morgan the dog, whose expertise was limited at best.  

I was effectively on my own, and I was spending almost $60 a day staying at Town Creek Marina.  Meanwhile, wind storms were still pounding the boat which kept me from leaving.  It was two days after dropping Antonio off in New Bern before I was able to pull away from Beaufort NC and raise the sails to continue the journey.  But I was able to get laundry done and restock the boat- as well as get to eat a meal with my parents who drove up from Wilmington to see me and my boat:

Monday February 27^th:

The mood (my mood) was cautious but somewhat triumphant as I pulled away and went past the shipping port for what I hoped would be the last time (and was, by boat anyway).  I was worried about leaving on my own- but couldn't afford to stay even if I wanted to, and I was anxious to reach a new destination- anywhere but where I'd been for far too long...

Pulling away from Town Creek Marina- striking out solo for the first time

I was able to use the wind for most of my endeavor that first day- saving the engine as much as I could.  I was still hesitant to trust the engine, if only because after all the trouble it had caused I couldn’t quite believe that a $15 part and a fuel additive could have really fixed the problem.  But I made my way by wind for as long as I could and got to see and do these:

Turning the corner, leaving that bridge behind (for the last time)

The sights as I moved away from the big shipping port 

This is the video I shot, you can probably hear the notes of caution and feigned excitement as I made my way towards what was next...

Unfortunately, I was right to be cautious, because when the wind died and I was forced to rely on the engine it wasn’t more than about 15 or 20 minutes before smoke started pouring out of the cabin, and it was clear I had bigger problems than a faulty and decomposing air filter.

Before I knew it I was dead in the water, and drifting onto the sandy shores of the ICW.  Again, I got to call Boat U.S. to tow me to a friendly port.  However, this time at least I got towed the right direction, further south, and away from the cursed Beaufort NC.

Nearly half of the distance made that day was by tow boat, so overall a pretty failed day.  In fact I made it about as far down the coast as Antonio and I did when we were on the ocean, but this time I was on the ICW side of the barrier island versus on the ocean side, where we were stranded.  I was delivered to Dudley’s Marina in Swansboro where the wind was picking up again.

The distance traveled in this post-

The Coast Guard boat that pulled up the night I arrived in Swansboro, just to make things interesting, and it leaving again in the morning- 

Over the next several days, while getting pounded by more windstorms that would blow me back north if they had their way, I learned more about how to diagnose the problem with my engine (because I couldn’t afford to hire a proper mechanic) and with the help of some of my Lake Norman boat buddies and the internet I tracked the problem to the raw water impeller- which is a little water wheel that draws seawater into the engine as coolant.  My problem was that there was no coolant running through the engine (hence the smoking cabin).

A bad picture of something about 2" wide- that black stuff is what is left of the raw water impeller

I was able to take their courtesy vehicle back to Beaufort NC, back to Town Creek Marina, where the mechanics had the part I needed… yet again in Beaufort.  

On the way back to Beaufort NC to pick up a new impeller

I like to go over every bridge I've gone under- just to be thorough...

It seemed no matter what I tried I just couldn’t get away from that town.  But at least the boat wasn’t coming back with me.  I changed out the obliterated impeller and ever since then I haven’t had any serious problems with the engine.  Considering that a working engine is a must for travelling on the ICW this layover of about a week in Swansboro was a necessary delay.  Additionally, I now know much more about my engine, which I’m sure will come in handy as the adventure continues.

So... here's to looking on the bright side!
Next Time:  Naval Firepower

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.

24 Hours of Going Everywhere, Definitely Somewhere… but Actually Nowhere

Well, any account wouldn’t be any good without a really epic adventure plugged in somewhere.  Of course any epic adventure would be a sham without a good potentially life threatening miscalculation/oversight.  

So here is the first of hopefully many really epic “mistakes” to grace the pages of this blog.  

Enjoy!

Wednesday, the 22^nd of February:

The way out of Beaufort Inlet, the clearly visible building is where we started, dubbed "The Hotel"

Antonio and I set out early to attack the headwind on the way South-  after our very dull (wind-wise) introduction to the ICW the day before, we were anxious to make some real headway, and Antonio was especially anxious to see what it was like out on “the big blue”.  Having sailed on the ocean before, I was slightly better prepared for the uncertainty it could offer, but I was keen to make some headway too.  It was probably this irrational urge to tackle something big and scary that led to our undoing, like so many before us no doubt.

We made it out of the Beaufort Inlet with some difficulty, tacking in and out of the wind to save the engine, and then proceeded about ten miles off the coast.  We would need to travel south-west towards Wilmington, but we had to tack east to keep from running back into the land.  It’s the painful part of traveling into the wind; spending too much time heading away from the destination, and far too little time cruising triumphantly towards it.

Putting distance between us and land...

This is the Chinook on its way back, we didn't get a shot of it directly overhead and loud

On the way out we got to see some really fun stuff, starting with dolphins (sorry, they are really tricky to get on camera).  We got buzzed by a Chinook on patrol a few times, by buzzed I mean we could read the lettering on the pilot’s sunglasses (the first indication that the military was paying some attention to us).

Meanwhile we had plenty of time to speculate what this mysterious ship was all about:

It was moving in and out on the main channel the entire time we headed away from land, and theories ranged from 'it’s training day' to 'the pilot anxiously needed to pee'

Finally far enough offshore we made our first big tack to the South, to the future.  The day went well as we alternated control of the vessel, meanwhile the other did stuff like confirm our position, make tea, and stare off into the unending horizon.  I suppose that is the one constantly impressive thing about being on the ocean when you’ve been enveloped by land forever leading up to the departure.  It’s easily recalled and imagined for anyone who’s been to the beach, but when it’s in front of your face as well as behind your ears, for hours, you really come to appreciate it.

Land is to starboard (right side of boat) not that you can much see it...

...moving on from postulating what is most impressive about the ocean… (everything is impressive).

So we made our way for most of the day, without much incident, and with plenty of documentation.

The nature of the trip changed when night started to fall, and we started making decisions based on how far we’d come and what we had left to go- namely, “Whaddayah think about this restricted area up ahead?”…  (refer to map at bottom of post)

We approached Bogue Inlet with the idea we’d stop and anchor for the night and resume our journey the next morning.  I had access to the weather forecast, and while it didn’t look too terrible rain-wise, the wind was getting heavier and we’d been moving all day.  I was not thrilled about what would have been an all-nighter into the wind to get to Wilmington (although Antonio was more for that idea) if we could stop and rest after what had already been a big day.  In referencing the charts it was difficult to get a read on how to enter the inlet.  Unlike Beaufort inlet, Bogue was narrow, shallow, and didn’t seem to have any good markers.

We got closer to take a good look, only to see a beach (with car headlights on it), and no apparent inlet at all…  This is more or less what it looked like on the GPS:

Looks like water to me...

…but all we could see was one massive beach with rather large crashing waves.  No inlet.

We were getting closer though, involuntarily riding waves crashing towards the beach.  I decided now was a time to use what little engine time we had at our disposal and gunned it back out to deeper waters.  

With the light fading fast and no way of telling where the "inlet" part of Bogue Inlet really was, we decided we had no choice but to skip the overnight rest area and keep moving towards Wilmington.  To do so, we would have to put a lot of distance between us and the coast, because we would need to get around the massive “Restricted Area”.

It became more and more obvious as we approached the restricted area that it was no joke, it was lit by a huge flare constantly, and from miles away we could see the “fence” of beacons that outlined its edge- on top of that there were muffled booming noises coming from that general direction.  All of that combined with the information about submerged explosives/mines that we got from our chart and it was clear that we shouldn’t mess with the military. 

Just about then, as we were getting used to the idea of a very uncomfortable night of wind, waves, and avoiding the military, we noticed the Coast Guard approaching us from the direction of the inlet.

They had seen us from the coast and assumed we were in trouble; I didn’t have the VHF radio on, so we didn’t hear them trying to hail us either.  Oops, my bad…

Anyway, after a lifetime of reassuring the circling coast guard patrol (and myself) that we were OK and weren’t in need of formal assistance the wind had only gotten stronger, and the swells were getting pretty rough.  While I wasn’t too worried about the structural state of the hull, seeing the steel rigging snapping between noodle-loose and too-tight got me nervous and we pulled in the sails to keep from demasting the boat…

Normally, the captain would cut the motor on… which we couldn’t do.  So we found ourselves looking at a stronger wind, that was blowing the wrong way, a motor we couldn’t count on, and sails that might break the camel’s back.  The nausea was bad enough when the weather was nice, and the nausea was bad enough riding crashing waves, the nausea was really bad with the Coast Guard patrol circling the boat taking down all our information… but none of it was as nauseating as floating along without any forward propulsion or method of directing the boat into the waves… that were still getting bigger.  We were adrift in mounting storm conditions.  Inside, the cabin was already strewn with every imaginable item that was totally useless at the time.  Nothing was left on the shelves, and the floor was invisible under all my personal belongings piled knee high.  Things were only getting worse.  Something had to be done.

Although it might not have been hopeless to head into the wind and try and get around the restricted area I decided it would be safer to turn the wind direction to our advantage and let it blow us back to where we came from, where we belonged at that time.  I pulled the headsail out just enough to give me some drive, with the headsail rolled out less than a third the wind was plenty strong enough to use that to point us back towards Beaufort.  So that’s what we did, for hours we backtracked with a handkerchief in the dark.

The swells were still massive, but they were pretty regular which helped because unlike movies would lead you to believe, they are almost impossible to see silhouetted against the stars:

A fabricated image(yes it's supposed to be dark) to give you the impression of what the waves look like at night... this particular one is right next to the boat

The big violent ones don’t look like it, while the most harmless ones can look scarier than the rest.  So continuing to get bashed around I looked for anything to take my mind off the danger, cold, and nausea. 

I stumbled across a game I dubbed “Seabird Slalom” after hearing an uncharacteristic “thud” and laughing at the incredibly surprised and awkward escape of a sleeping seabird- my first “roadkill” (it flew away just fine).  It still boggles my mind to some degree how I was able to run into a bird with my slow moving banged up boat…  Keep in mind that the boat was making a lot of noise in that wind, with ropes smacking the mast a few times a second, the rigging snapping to and fro in the gusts, and the waves slapping the hull.

If you’re at all afraid of the dark I don’t recommend the experience.  The sleeping seabirds a few feet away, were no more defined than a plastic jug...

This was definitely the darkest chapter in the Big Venture thus far, without a trustworthy engine and rigging that was not inspiring confidence, I was still looking at the prospect of re-entering Beaufort Inlet in wind-storm conditions.  

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one concerned with our immediate future.  Antonio told me later that during one of his shifts a spotlight on shore tracked us for miles.

… and miles and miles and miles of this.  I suppose I should thank ADHD that in the intense attention that must be paid in a situation like this I found a sense of… boredom?  

Which isn’t the right word for it of course, but when your nerves have been frayed for that long without anything really terrible actually happening, you just get sort of sick of it- it becomes monotonous...

...a sense that got forcefully refreshed with dread as I started seeing the beacons in the distance marking the channel we would need follow to enter Beaufort Inlet.  

The inlet meant we were close to a place we could put in for the night, a place we could sleep, a place we could get off the boat and kiss the ground.  But it also meant a harrowing journey through the unpredictable inlet that was difficult enough to get out of earlier that day when we were freshly awake and oh yeah, when we could see…

It got really nerve racking when we made the turn into the main channel leading to the inlet, the wind was coming at more of an angle now, and so were the waves.  The currents around inlets are unpredictable always, and in these storm conditions in the dark I was having to quadruple check our position and verify and re-verify where the markers were- this must have gotten really annoying for Antonio, but he did a great job reassuring me again and again with the chart, the GPS and the spotlight we were using to read markers…  Meanwhile the waves were getting more violent and frothy seeming, or was it because we were at a less submissive angle than we had been all night?

Soon we were riding crashing waves that seemed to put Bernoulli on the same scale as a surfboard.  I was terrified that one of these crashing waves was going to “drop” the boat on a sandbank, breaking its back and starting the sinking process.  I figured it was due time alert the Coast Guard of our situation.

Antonio had his doubts about bringing the authorities into the picture, but I figured that is what they are there for, and that their services yield the most benefit for those that make the call earlier rather than too late…

Antonio made the call on the VHF asking for an escort- Since my VHF radio is inside the cabin Antonio was having to relay their questions and answers to me in the cockpit.  Meanwhile, I even more distractedly continued into the gauntlet, I mean inlet, still without engine power -gnashing my teeth the whole time.

Unfortunately the Coast Guard only arrived after we had made it through the treacherous mouth of the inlet and were back in protected waters.  First thing they asked as they approached was if we were carrying any weapons- I immediately thought of my machete… next question was where it was located on the boat… I immediately thought of the knee deep swamp of personal belongings...  

They asked question after question about where this and that, I simply kept answering “Probably on the floor?”

In the end they did escort us the remaining few thousand feet to a slip just up the way from where we started the previous morning.  

The time was about 5:30am when the Coast Guard left us with a ticket for having expired flares… 

I don’t regret calling them, because we were probably lucky we didn’t need their assistance in the end, and had we slightly less luck on our side they might have been fishing us out of the water.

We were utterly exhausted, I’ve probably only been that psychologically strained a small handful of times in my whole life, and after grappling with the rudder all day and night and having been so utterly consumed by stress over survival for such a long time, it was a rather unreal experience peeling off the wet clothes and literally picking up the pieces of my shattered life off the floor.  But we were safe, as hard as it was to convince myself it was over.

The next day when we awoke safe and sound... pheew!

The sheet from the chart book we used that day AFTER being repaired with masking tape and hung out to dry...

The path we took on that day of adventure, with the Marines' restricted area on the left

The Icy Dub Ya

Let me take this opportunity to expound on the merits, or demerits of the Intracoastal Waterway.  Fondly referred to as "the ditch" by those familiar with braving its waters, the ICW is narrow, shallow, vaguely signposted, and busy.  It is a marvel of human engineering, costs an exorbitant amount of money to build and maintain, and is a gross tribute to American consumerism... God bless it.  In many ways you could think of it as a 3rd world highway, here in America, made for possibly the strangest and oldest vehicles on the planet.

Like these::

So now that you've seen what we were up against, I'll return to the tale:

Antonio and I set out from Oriental riding the wind that was in our face the day before, and it took us maybe half an hour to cross a distance that had previously taken hours.  Then, as quick as entering an inlet- our wind was gone, blocked by the stupid trees and marshes that line the banks of the ICW.  Now keep in mind, that most people run their engines constantly to overcome these circumstances, which wasn't an option for us since our engine lasted about five minutes before suddenly and inexplicably shutting off.  We couldn't afford to be without the engine when we needed it most, so we had to rely on the minute amount of wind and the current to S.L.O.W.L.Y. move us along, thus saving the engine for when we needed to avoid a giraffe, or something else unexpected.

This put Morgan (comfortably) to sleep leaving only wine to comfort we humans... while we watched a lot of this go by:

At least until we got here:

Drum roll... the very first bridge Bernoulli ever went under (captained my me at least)...

At which point, so excited by the presence of something, we went a little camera crazy...

And those are just the ones I bothered to include here...

It's true, we were bored, you'll notice in the photos the utterly limp sails, clinging to the boat like shedding skin (gross, sorry).

But things were about to get more interesting, although the wind didn't.  The ICW opened up as we approached Morehead City a big state port.  We witnessed a champagne sipping couple who had just gotten their boat in the water after a year of being "on the hard", which is a ceremonious feeling I can associate with.  Of course their engine was working, so maybe I can't associate that well.  We got to see our first dolphin (which are incredibly hard to photograph by the way).  Historic buildings, or what was left of them:

Then the glory of glories to a bored yacht crew... really, really big fucking boats, oh and some more bridges we got to go under...

Yeah, I know this one runs off the page, but it really was that big...

There's even a photograph of genuinely looking around instead of the silly farce of earlier (and PJ pants):

Then we pulled into a marina to a rather beautiful cloudy sunset, I took Morgan for a desperate walk, where I showed my own crude canine nature on the beach (if you know what I mean) and we were all very relieved...

We took a nice walk to check out what was around, and found this:

 and then trespassed a little.