North Carolina ICW to Southport (Cape Fear)

We stopped for a couple of nights in Beaufort NC to top up on fuel, take on water and groceries, do laundry, and visit the town. Our friends on Dreamcatcher, Sharon and Greg, were already in Beaufort and we had fun meeting up with them to watch a football game in a local bar. 

The next day, while doing laundry, I got into a heated conversation with a couple about any number of things that essentially always reverted back to politics. We live in strange times. On occasion, it's hard to keep conversations steered away from topics that rankle.  I went back to the boat with stacks of clean laundry and a migraine headache. 

In Beaufort there's a beautiful old woodworking shop where you can watch folks make wooden boats.  

One of the classic old boats in the Beaufort harbor was a gorgeously restored "Trumpy", a design originating back home in Eastport, Maryland, This one is named "Freedom"; the internet has good information on its restoration.

 

On October 21 we anchored for a couple of nights in Oriental NC to stretch our legs on shore again and to visit with Deb and Dick, long-time cruising friends who live there. It was great to see them.

The photo below is of the harbor at Oriental. We also participated one evening in a pot luck dinner hosted by a couple who are members (like us) of the OCC - the Ocean Cruising Club. There was a lot of animated conversation about cruising experiences and we made the acquaintance of several couples who had great tales to tell of sailing to Ireland, the Mediterranean and other distant destinations. Some of the stories were inspiring and others were flat-out hair-raising.  

We had lunch at M and M's one day, a local restaurant with good food and killer desserts. Here is Jim struggling to finish an enormous piece of pecan pie with whipped  cream.  He looks like he's going to throw up, right? But he finished it!!

Along the ICW in North Carolina there are lots of opportunities to see interesting, odd or outright bizarre things. We passed Camp Lejeune and anchored for the night in Mile Hammock Bay inside the military "restricted area", which is sometimes closed to ICW traffic due to practice maneuvers involving live fire and all manner of military equipment. There were no such restrictions to travel this trip, but we did get a demonstration of dive practice for several guys among the anchored boats...

Further along the next day we saw this enormous pink house with matching lighthouse. Some of the dwellings along the ICW are very modest and tastefully constructed. Many, however, are not very attractive. Some are just outrageous - huge and garish, new and raw, frequently looking very uninhabited.

Sometimes there are derelict boats abandoned along the waterway. This one met a rough end on a rocky shore.

This house had a very large sculpture of a giraffe in the front yard. Gotta wonder why.

More in keeping with the natural environment, we often see herons, egrets and other wading birds, and dolphins that entertain you by swimming alongside the boat for several minutes at a time.

Much of the waterway is quiet, peaceful and uninhabited. Very beautiful at times.
















Further south, we spent one night at the Carolina Beach State Park Marina, a quiet. calm little spot that offers, for $30 a night,  dockage, hot showers, water, fuel, a laundry room, hiking trails and access to grocery stores a 1.5 mile walk away through the park.

This was sunset at the Park

We left the State Park Marina at dawn and headed for Cape Fear several miles down the river, where we exited the ICW to run off shore for about 30 hours to reach Charleston without suffering the severe shoaling and various other hazards and delays along the ICW in this area of the waterway. However, about 5 miles off shore the engine began to act up and then died. Jim changed the alternator belt, but it wasn't that. The engine started up again but soon shut down a second time. We decided to get towed back into Southport at the entrance to the Cape Fear Inlet to figure out what needed to be done. The photo below is of TowBoat US towing us back in off the ocean. If you zoom in on the photo you can see the yellow tow line between Neverland and the tow boat.

I'll explain the rest in the next post :-)