Thawing out and cleaning up

Baufort impressions:

This bike clearly spent a good deal of time underwater. I doubt the brakes work well. And the barnacles on the seat might not be too comfortable.

It's definitely past tourist season now. We dined out in a virtually empty restaurant. There was no traffic, so I did my favorite thing and lay down on Main Street.

Beaufort was a nice break. The guys went surfing the one time.  But instead of going again on Monday morning, we set sail and headed SW for the next destination. We left on Monday, hoping to get favorable, although freezing winds, for an 80+ mile sail down to Cape Fear/Wilmington area by the next morning. The weather was sunny and pretty nice as we left Beaufort. As we sailed (too close) by Camp LeJeune, the marine bootcamp, we were buzzed by various military planes. Turns out we were sailing within their restricted space. No doubt they knew all about us well before that!

We kept waiting and waiting for the next cold front to push us on a favorable tack towards Cape Fear. It came pretty late, causing us to have to tack all over the place to get away from shore. But by my watch at 10 PM it kicked in and we had a wooly sail off the wind, dancing along in 30+ knots of wind. (For you non-sailors, a knot is slightly more than a mile an hour and 30 knots is a handful of weather. Fair weather sailing is 10-20 knots. )

This is actually a photo of a nice, mellow day on the water. Picture a 5' chop splashing spray into our faces for 4 hours and you will get the idea of the fun we had in Cape Fear River.

By morning we had to turn into the wind, which was now blowing freezing air at about 40 knots. We had to BASH into the channel, which took hours. As we entered the inlet to the Cape Fear River, we breathed a sigh of relief, hoping the winds would mellow out. Wrong. It was nasty and windy, with a very steep chop that soaked us with spray and nearly stopped the boat dead on each wave as we slogged up towards Wilmington, 23 or so miles up the river. When the current switched against us, we realized that with a limping transmission and straight into the wind, we had no chance of getting up the river. UGH.

So we turned around and headed back down the river, undoing 2 hours of hideous slogging, and pulled into a very nice marina on the Inland Waterway in sheltered waters. Hot showers! Laundromat! Land! My sea legs really felt the motion of the ocean as I walked around on land.