June 28, 2006 – Summer Weather?

We left Wrightsville Beach early Sunday morning with Seaview. The sky was dark and overcast with rain predicted. There were three bridges on the route with restricted hours for opening, and it kept us hustling to make each of them without having to wait up to an hour for the next openings. With the help of a favorable current and a little leeway by the bridge tenders, we were lucky to get through them all with minor delays. About noon it started to rain, and the boats were deluged with frequent squalls, sometimes with zero visibility, and thunder and lightning crashed all around. Fortunately, we are able to completely enclose our cockpit, so we stayed dry and warm, but Keith had to steer Seaview out in an open cockpit, where he was cold and soaking wet. Not fun! They decided to stop at a marina early in the day, while we continued on to an enclosed basin in an upscale housing development, where we anchored for a very quiet night.

Again on Monday we motored through a dark, drizzly day, and found a remote creek to anchor in overnight, before crossing the exposed Pantego Sound on Tuesday morning. Since the forecast was for increasing winds on Tuesday, we crossed the Sound early in the day and had a good trip with a brisk sail. After the crossing, we decided to go to a marina in Belhaven, NC, where we could do internet and laundry and walk ashore into town. With some difficulty in the stiff breeze we managed to tie up alongside the marina dock about noon, and Cliff was having second thoughts about the wisdom of being there.

At about three in the afternoon, a storm came in, and we experienced perhaps the worst weather of the entire trip, with torrential rains, 50 knt wind, and huge whitecaps coming over the breakwater and crashing into the boats at the dock. A couple of boats were damaged and a Nordhaven cruiser snapped off two pilings and a finger dock. Because Skylark was tied alongside on the downwind side, we survived intact, and while the storm raged, I was inside the big colonial inn at the marina, not on the boat. After four days of rain we were ready to put the boat on a truck sooner rather than later and head for home and a pleasant northwest summer. Of course there is the problem that we haven't found moorage in Vancouver yet!

We managed a day without rain yesterday, and so far today it has been dry, but hot and muggy. But as I write, there is thunder and lightning around us. We are in the Elizabeth City town docks, the “Harbor of Hospitality”, and again we are wondering if we wouldn’t be better out on the anchor. This eastern summer weather is the pits!

June 24, 2006 – Good Service in the Land of Plenty

The alternator problem Cliff fixed in Georgetown only stayed fixed for two days, failing again just as we arrived at Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington, North Carolina. But no problem -- after a call to the Seattle manufacturer, we had a new alternator delivered to a nearby UPS depot, installed, and working, within 24 hours!! What a difference from waiting weeks and months for boat parts in foreign countries!

At about the same time as Skylark’s alternator was failing, I (Orma) noticed that the eyesight in my left eye had suddenly disappeared. It took only one phone call to an ophthalmology clinic to be connected to the retinal specialist on call, and by noon that day, after having been diagnosed with a detached retina, I was having a pneumatic retinopexy, an office procedure involving a cryogenic probe to repair the retina and the insertion of a gas to form a bubble to push the retina back in place. Follow-up involves keeping my head tilted at a specific angle to hold the bubble in place for the next five days, and a check-up in a week to make sure healing is taking place. A return visit to the Dr. the next day resulted in his go-ahead to continue the trip with a referral to a colleague for an appointment in Norfolk. Fortunately, between our BC Medical coverage and BCAA Travel Insurance, all the medical expenses will be covered.

The anchorage at Wrightsville Beach was a fun location with lots of action involving water-skiing, tubing and boogie boarding, with fizzboats and jet-skiis buzzing by. Within easy walking distance of the excellent dinghy dock there were groceries, restaurants, and the ocean beach. With our rental car we were able to go sightseeing in Wilmington, a historic southern city with gracious antebellum homes and shady oak-lined streets.

Two boats from our past showed up in the anchorage – Blind Date, with Ashley and Carol, whom we had met in Venezuela, and Seaview, with Eva and Keith, the couple we met in the Turks and Caicos. We’ve met several other boats who are also late northward-bound cruisers, and we are enjoying bumping into them every now and then in various marinas and anchorages.

June 20, 2006 – Grounded on the Intra-Coastal Waterway (ICW)

We had forgotten that doing the ICW is not a piece of cake. Unlike passages at sea where you can set the autopilot and read a book while you travel, the ICW requires constant attention. A maze of rivers, natural channels, and dredged cuts, protected from the Atlantic by barrier islands, the ICW is generally shallow, narrow, and twisty, and it is necessary to keep one hand on the wheel, a finger on the chart to mark the spot, one eye on the depth sounder, and the binoculars handy to spot the next red and green channel markers.

Sometimes the route changes from a very narrow channel to a river mouth that is miles wide, with strong currents and many shoals, and spotting the markers can be like playing ‘Where’s Waldo?”

The Corps of Engineers does not have the budget to keep the ICW dredged, and with the decline of commercial traffic using the route, many sections will probably not be passable at all in a few years.

We found out the hard way the folly of traveling at low tide when we got stuck in the mud in the channel by Jekyll Island. Fortunately, the mud is soft, and we were able to get off by getting down the dinghy and 9.9 hp motor, attaching a line, and pulling the stern out to the deepest area, about six inches deeper than our keel. Unfortunately, we were too busy to take a picture of this embarrassing moment.

Much of the trip takes us through a wilderness of marshland where there is no sign of civilization and very little boat traffic. Last night we anchored in the South Santee River, all alone in the middle of miles of marshland. Surprisingly, we were still able to receive good TV reception, and we watched the local Carolina Hurricanes beat Edmonton in the last game of the Stanley Cup finals. This morning an alligator swam by the boat. We see many beautiful birds, pelicans diving for fish, and dolphins swimming slowly by. For the first time, we have been traveling with all the screens down to defend ourselves from the insect population. We have been pleasantly surprised with the weather, generally sunny with cool breezes across the water, and the nights are very comfortable.

Closer to the centers of population there are beautiful homes with sweeping green lawns and enormously long docks along the tidal riverfront. We personally wouldn’t choose to build a multi-million dollar home on a muddy, alligator-infested, buggy swamp, but the pretty views, pleasant weather (except for summer storms!), good fishing, proximity to the ocean beaches, and thousands of miles of wilderness to explore, contribute to the lure of the low country for the many who choose to live here.

We are in a marina today due to another mechanical problem, which Cliff has now repaired. A shrimp boat has just docked upwind of us, and it is smelling pretty fishy. Yesterday we bought some fresh shrimp at a dock and ate our fill at dinner. Somebody please tell us that shrimp are not really bad for cholesterol!

June 18, 2006 – Visiting Friends and Meeting Alberto

Two weeks without a computer leaves a big gap in the journal and means there is lots to catch up on. Our computer died an orderly death four days after the one-year warrantee expired. At the time we were at a marina in Daytona Beach and had a rental car, so we were able to take the computer to an excellent service depot. After several phone calls to Toshiba, we were successful in getting them to agree to pay for the repair, which was major. We took a day off to drive to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, where we toured the huge complex, saw a fabulous IMAX movie about the space station currently circling the earth, touched a moon rock and revisited the historic moon landing of 1969, and ran out of time before we saw all we wanted to. We left the computer in Daytona for repair while we continued north, then had it Fed-Exed to Savannah, where we picked it up on Friday. It’s like being reunited with an old friend.

Speaking of old friends, we have had a very sociable couple of weeks. After leaving Daytona, we traveled to Amelia Island/Fernandina Beach, where we left Skylark in a marina and spent the night with Denny and Linda Andrews, former cruisers whom we met in Luperon in 2000. The next day we left Florida and motored to Brunswick, Georgia, where we took a marina slip for three nights so that we could drive across to the Tallahassee area to see friends Steve and Gail Tribble, with whom we had shared many happy hours in Venezuela. We enjoyed seeing their lovely home on the St. Mark’s River and taking a Saturday afternoon cruise on the river with them. We saw manatees, a raccoon, an owl, and many beautiful birds and flowers, but no alligators.

It was a pleasure to attend church with Steve and Gail on Sunday, but we were all getting concerned about the tropical storm Alberto which was heading our way, so we left promptly to drive back to Brunswick, and they set about to secure their home, in a vulnerable spot on the river, and their boat Misty Bleu, which they had left at a marina on the Gulf Coast while they came home to meet us.

Alberto was projected to hit on Tuesday, but on Sunday night when we got back to the boat, a squall was blowing hard from the south, and the boat, on a dock exposed to the south, was bouncing around quite badly. We secured it with extra lines and rode out the squall, but first thing next morning we moved around to the opposite side of the dock. Good thing, too, as when the storm finally arrived Tuesday afternoon, Brunswick was in the centre of its path, and the wind blew from the south at 40+ knots for several hours. The boats still on the outside dock took quite a pounding, but we were fine and even managed to enjoy some cable TV while the storm raged. It was just a storm, not a hurricane, but it was nasty enough to increase our resolve to move north ASAP. A group of our friends (boats Side by Side, Makai, Living Well) who were a few days ahead of us were in Charleston when the remnants of the storm descended on their marina as a tornado!! Some of the boats were damaged, and one man was thrown from his boat into the water, but fortunately there were no injuries.

We were happy to finally start out again after six nights, rather than the intended three at Brunswick Landing Marina, determined to anchor out whenever possible from then on. After a pleasant day winding our way through the twisty ICW and crossing a couple of major sounds, we turned up Kilkenny Creek to find an anchorage. Just as Cliff was dropping the hook, a man called out to us from the dock of his lovely waterfront home and invited us to come and tie up at his dock. “We can’t let you canucks go by without extending some southern hospitality!” he said. He was a very pleasant retired Delta airline captain, and we had a good chat with him on the dock, then walked through the lush, rural countryside to a nearby restaurant for a shrimp dinner.

After a very quiet night, we left in the morning mist for the short trip to Savannah, admiring the gracious southern waterfront homes along the way. In Savannah, friends Frank and Paulette Bomberger, also fellow Venezuelan ex-cruisers, picked us up from Isle of Hope Marina and gave us a tour of their lovely city (including the obligatory stops at West Marine and a supermarket), and showed us Frank’s interesting place of employment (Global Shipbuilders), where he manages the refitting and repairing of megayachts. Then we went to their beautiful new home for dinner and a good time of visiting and reminiscing. While we were there, Pam and Chas phoned from Grenada on video-Skype, and we had a great time laughing and talking together. Pam and Chas are looking for housesitters for a couple of months this summer – is anybody out there interested in having an extended vacation in Grenada??

On Saturday we motored and even sailed a little to Beaufort (Bewfort), South Carolina. After an unsuccessful attempt at anchoring off the town, we went along to Factory Creek, and as we approached the anchorage, we recognized the lovely classic yawl Fairwyn, a boat that left Vancouver Rowing Club in 1999, the same week we did! Stephen and Nancy Carlman headed south in Fairwyn to Mexico, through the Panama, and toured Central America, Colombia, Ecuador and the Western Caribbean, so we never connected down south, but what a surprise to meet up with them in a little creek in South Carolina seven years later! They intend to spend a few years yet on the water, and are planning to take their boat to its birthplace, Halifax, for its fiftieth birthday next year.