April 2015

It’s Monday morning and Pandora’s secure on the dock in New Bern NC at the New Bern Grand marina.  It’s hard to believe that we are here after months of saying “we are headed to New Bern…”Well, we’re here, on the dock and it’s time to act.  So, yesterday we began what will take us much of the rest of the week, the unraveling of 8 years of our life aboard Pandora.  It’s hard to believe that after all this time we are finally doing it.  We are selling Pandora.  

However, all is not lost as we will, in less than two weeks, be taking delivery on the “new” Pandora, the Aerodyne 47 that I have written about in past posts.   I won’t belabor this except to if you have somehow missed my incessant ramblings on the subject, you can see a post that I did a while back about the new boat.

I can’t recall if I already posted this photo, but the boat, now Ariel, soon to be Pandora, was photographed in the Bahamas a few weeks ago by a friend.  We made great progress yesterday as we began removing personal items and a lot of “stuff” that has accumulated over the years.  We have not yet gotten to some of the areas that are really deeply buried and I expect that we will find some surprises.  I am fearful that I will finally locate the bag of dry cat food we brought aboard three years ago to feed tropical fish in the Bahamas.  I have searched and searched and have never been able to locate it.  Here fishy fishy…

It’s going to take lots of boxes to get all the stuff into our rental car so we made a run to to pick up some up at the local liquor store.  We thought that we had plenty.  Not even close .  Now things weren’t quite as neat and tidy as is normally the case aboard Pandora. The aft cabin has really gotten out of control.  While I consider myself to a pretty tidy guy, Brenda disagrees and has labeled me a “closet messy”.  Perhaps the aft cabin is often a bit cluttered but this is over the top.   And, that’s not even the half of it. A small amount, so far, spilled out onto the dock.  Off to the van we rented.  And, this is only the beginning.  Hope it all fits.After a long day of unpacking and cleaning we decided to take a walk in New Bern last evening.  What a beautiful city.  This is the city hall building and it’s still in use.  Great brick work. We also visited a local landmark, Tryon Palace once the home to the Colonial Governor prior to the revolution.   What a spot. It was the first constructed in 1770 but was destroyed by fire less than 20 years later.  A major fund raising initiative was conducted in New Bern and the grounds and buildings were rebuilt in the 1950s.  The locals are quite proud of this museum and work hard to keep everything in top shape.  The compound has some terrific buildings.  This is a favorite spot for weddings and we had to work hard to stay out of the way of three, count em three, brides having pictures taken.   The azaleas are in full bloom as is much everything else.   The Pollen count is sky high.  It’s on everything, coating yellow everywhere including my nose. Yuck…The gardens are spectacular.  How about a espaliered apple tree. 

They must have someone on staff that loves trimming hedges as they are everywhere and in perfect shape.
The gardens go on and on…  At home gardens are my problem.  “Bob, wouldn’t it be great if we had a garden here?  Grass is just so boring.”   No, I’ll just stand and enjoy someone else’s work right now. Fig trees.  Bummer that the fruit wasn’t ripe.  I’d have been tempted to snag a sample.  After garden overload we walked around town.  Brenda loved this rose bush.Wisteria is growing everywhere along the roadside.  However, it’s at it’s best when someone keeps tab on things like on this arbor. Well, enough about fun, all this blogging isn’t getting Pandora unraveled.   I guess I need coffee to face that.

It’s Thursday morning and Pandora is secure on one of the FREE public docks here in Oriental.  We arrived yesterday after a short 35nm run from the bight of Cape Lookout.  

Our visit to Cape Lookout was wonderful, if a bit cool and rainy.  Perhaps that was for the best as the weather certainly enhanced the primeval mood of the place.   That’s Brenda way-out-there…  “Brenda, can you hear me now?”  Nope…Lots of sea birds.  These are migratory terns, visiting from the Arctic, I think. Don’t ask me what type as we left our bird book home in CT.  Oh well, let’s just call them terns for now. Many dolphins visited us while we were anchored.  It’s maddeningly difficult to get a good shot of these beautiful animals.  This is a dolphin fin, in case you can’t tell.  I guess you had to be there.Brenda and I took several walks on the beach, especially to so some shelling.  Of all the beaches we have visited, we have never been on a beach with more shells.  The selection wasn’t that great but there were tons of them.   This shot is of one particularly rich area.  Loads and loads.  “Bob, is the picture upside down?”  Not sure. With the exception of a few campers we had the beach to ourselves.  No exaggeration, the beach went on for miles.   Pretty amazing.  Why someone would choose to camp on sand is a mystery to me.  Sand on my feet is bad enough.  Sand EVERYWHERE… Yuck!.  .

Nice haul…What a great lighthouse and newly painted. Brenda “set a moment” on the keeper’s house, now museum.Back in the “pre GPS” age, mariners would spot a light during the day and to help them identify, sort-of where in the Hell they were, each was painted with a distinctive pattern.  Cape Lookout light, all 185’ of it, was painted with a very distinctive diamond pattern.  The white diamonds were oriented north to south and black to east to west.  Or was it the other way around?  Not certain.  Sure glad that we have a plotter and GPS.

Big painted diamonds on a 185’ tall lighthouse or not, literally hundreds of ships foundered on the nearby shores.   Happily, not Pandora.  However, when we were leaving yesterday morning, we had to pick our way out of the bight in fog with a visibility of about ¼ mile for the 6nm to Beaufort Inlet.    The sunrise was spectacular.  At least I think it was the sunrise.  Hard to say in the fog.We had heard on the radio that the Coast Guard was re-positioning markers in the Beaufort inlet so we were cautioned to be particularly diligent as we came up the channel.   I wouldn’t want to bump into them.  The ship made the huge marker look positively diminutive.  Either that or the people on deck were Lilliputians.   Hmm…It wasn’t long before the ship faded into the fog.As we made our way through the marsh, north of Beaufort, we enjoyed watching the homes go by.  “Dammit Gladys, why does everything that comes into this house have to be in frigging primary colors?”  Anyway, we are now in Oriental, home to “free docks”.  Now, that’s not something that you see in Martha’s Vineyard.   Nice dock tucked next to the commercial docks.  Can you say “big red boat”.   Sure makes Pandora look teeny.We met a nice gentleman across the dock from England who “crossed the pond”  a while back and is now sailing in US waters with his black kitty.   Mogs, a cute little boy kitty, visited Pandora and perched on the sail cover.  Nice kitty…We couldn’t tell if this tern was scolding Mogs or asking for cheese and crackers as he “stared us down” from a nearby piling.So, here we sit, aboard Pandora in lovely Oriental NC, a stones throw from New Bern, where we are headed tomorrow.  I have to say that we Brenda and I are getting a bit nostalgic knowing that we will soon be separating ourselves from our life aboard Pandora, something that has consumed much of our time for years.

It’s certainly bringing back many memories and I expect it’s not going to feel  great as we remove everything from her lockers and drive away a week from now.  Not terrific, in part, because we’ll soon be two-boat-owners.  I don’t know exactly how many miles Pandora has taken us over the last 8 years but it’s certainly been a great ride (if sometimes less smooth than Brenda would hope for) and we are going to miss her. Editor: I meant miss Pandora, not Brenda to be perfectly clear.

Well, today we will just have to work hard to make our last day aboard Pandora, here in Oriental, the best it can be.   Yes, that’s the spirit.

Enough of that, it’s time to make coffee.  Yes, that will make everything better. Well it will make it clearer, at least.  “Bob, NO it won’t… You drink decaf.”

Got it, decaf.

It’s Tuesday morning and we are anchored in the bight at guess what– Cape Lookout.  What a spot.  The lighthouse at Cape Lookout is unique, white with black diamonds painted down the sides.     Cape Lookout is located about equidistant between Beaufort NC and Cape Hatteras.  Actually, to look at a chart you’d think that this was part of Cape Hatteras, which it, sort of, is.  Anyway, a nice place.

This is a very remote spot and as I write this there is only one other boat within view and they are perhaps ¾ of a mile away.

Lookout is an area of miles of shifting sand dunes and as we rounded the point yesterday I was amazed to see that the two buoys marking the approach aren’t on station at all.  If you were to round them normally, you’d run hard aground.  That’s pretty obvious on the Garmin i-pad charts but my Raymarine plotter, with older charts, shows just how much the sand has migrated over the years.   In fact, one of the floating marks is actually in about 1’ of water at low tide.  Not exactly in the right position at all.

However, after rounding and not grounding, we were greeted by a lovely view of the lighthouse in the late afternoon light. After a few days in Wrightsville Beach we left yesterday to make the run here, an ocean shot of over 75nm.  We had debated going on the inside but there is so much shoaling in the ICW along the stretch to Beaufort that we expected it would take three days to make the run because of the timing of the tides, low at mid day.  I have gone through that section twice before but the tides were high in teh middle of the day so it worked just fine.  Transiting much of NC needs to be managed that way.

We headed out of the inlet with Kismet at dawn and were greeted by a beautiful sunrise framing our friends and their boat. Actually, there’s was the only boat we saw for the whole day.  I guess everyone else was at work after a long Easter weekend.

By going outside we were able to make the run in a single day what would have taken three short days inside, and all during daylight.  However, it didn’t turn out to be a great day for Brenda as there was a swell coming in on the beam the entire day and there was only a light breeze on the nose which meant that there wasn’t anything to stabilize the boat.  After about 11 hours of the boat rolling from side to side in the swells, a nice breeze finally picked up, but not until we were only a few miles from our destination.  Oh well, not a lot of knitting for Brenda yesterday.

However, we were able to anchor in time to enjoy the sunset and a nice steak dinner.  A good ending after a long day.  We had decided to visit Cape Lookout as our new friends Laurie and Jim of Kismet had told us about this spot and encouraged us to visit. 

So, we plan on staying here for two nights and then we’ll make the rest of the run to New Bern beginning early Thursday for a Friday arrival.  Happily, the flood up into the Beaufort area coincides nicely with our plans to make the 10 mile run to the inlet from here on Thursday morning.

This is an amazing place and while it’s only a short distance from a populated area of NC (there’s even pretty good cell coverage) and yet it looks like a spot that could easily be a thousand miles from anywhere.

This is the view of the lighthouse that greeted me at sunrise today.   After a few shots, I was even able to time the photo to coincide with the flash of the 15sec light.  Wow!  Can you say Wow first thing in the morning?  I did…Today we’ll be heading to the beach for a walk and some shelling, something that we’ve been told is terrific here.

I am excited and yes, this truly is a great spot to “look out”…at.

It’s Easter morning and I have to say that it feels a bit weird to be sitting here as if it’s just any day of the year.  However, it’s blowing pretty hard and we didn’t feel like heading ashore just yet.    However, I did make fresh biscuits for breakfast so it felt a bit special. 

Just in case you were wondering how our run with the current up the Cape Fear River  (Brenda just loves the name of that river) went, well wait no longer.   Here goes…

My plan was to hit Southport and head up the river at slack tide, about 2:00, two days ago.  Unfortunately, I neglected to note that the river doesn’t turn with the tide at Southport at all.  “That’s right Bob.  It’s CURRENT, not tide”  So, as we headed out into the river we began bucking a 4kt adverse current and did so ALL THE WAY up the 10 miles to our destination.   Fortunately, there was about 20kts of wind on our stern so, while the water was plenty lumpy, with wind against the current, we were able to motor-sail with the jib all the way.  In spite of our boat speed of nearly 9kts at times, we crawled up the river, against the current at a crawl, sometimes less than 4kts over the bottom.  Had the current been with us, we would have made the 10 miles in about an hour but it took us 2.5 hours instead.

Anyway, we made it, even if it took a lot longer than expected.  I guess we were just paying penance for our good run, with the current, going to Calabash the day prior.

We picked up a mooring in Carolina Beach which was a good idea as the wind blew hard overnight and we definitely felt more secure on a mooring as the wind gusts peaked at nearly 30kts.

Yesterday we made a short 10 mile run from there to Wrightsville Beach where we are now.

Along the way we only ran aground twice but that was to be expected as we passed a number of small inlets where the currents cause lots of shoaling, a particular problem here in NC.  And to make matters worse, the tide was low mid morning so we had even less water to work with.  I recall that on our run here two years ago, we had problems then too.

With all the shoaling problems to address, we passed a number of dredges, one was over 400’ long working in a major inlet.  This one was much smaller.  I was struck by just how tiny this tug pushing the dredge barge was.  I can’t imagine that it would even float without being attached to the barge.We also passed a number of shrimp boats tied up on local docks.  They look great in this picture but close up they clearly need a bit of TLC.  It’s got to be tough to compete with the low price of farm raised shrimp.  Nice lines though.From here we have about 80 miles to Beaufort where we will head north to New Bern.  I mention this because this next section is particularly prone to shoaling and low tide is late morning each day.   This means that we will have a very tough time making distance with the lowest water happening in the middle of the day.  The best way to make it over shoals is to time our passage when high tide hits in the middle of the day, something that we were able to do in GA which made it possible to cover some pretty good distances in spite of grounding hazards.  

We had a nice couple, Jim and Laurie from Kismet, over for cocktails last night and they mentioned that they planned to make the run to Beaufort offshore because of the shoaling and tide problems.    And, as the run from here if 70 miles, they planned to jump out at dusk tonight and time their arrival in Beaufort for dawn and a rising tide, which will make it easy to run up the river.

Brenda, who doesn’t really like sailing in the ocean and much less at night, seems intrigued by the idea of sailing in company with them so perhaps we’ll do it.  The only negative is that it’s pretty windy as I write this and it’s from the wrong way.   However, the winds are supposed to drop considerably this evening so perhaps we’ll give it a try.  It will be a motorboat ride anyway but much more appealing than bumping along the shoals of the ICW.   Besides, because of the timing of the tide, it would take three days on the “inside” to do what what we will be able to do in a single night on the “outside”.

I don’t know what we will do yet as it depends on what the winds do this afternoon.  If they settle down I expect that we will make the jump outside and if we do, we may very well stop at Cape Lookout National Seashore, just south of Cape Hatteras for a few days as we have heard that it’s a very beautiful area.

So, is it Wrightsville Beach for a few days or will we leave tonight?  I guess we’ll have to see what happens with the winds this afternoon to know if we are staying our going.  And you, dear reader, will have to check back to find out.

I guess that’s all for now.

It’s Friday morning and I am not certain if I am in South or North Carolina as it depends on whether I am on the south side, north or perhaps the center of the Calabash river that marks the border of the Carolinas.   Oh well, I am definitely here in “the Carolinas” and not far from our destination, New Bern, which is only about 200 miles from here.   Considering that we have gone over 1,500 miles on this trip since leaving St Mary’s in early January, it’s just stone throw.

Our plan for today is to head about 30 miles to Southport at Cape Fear (Brenda just loves that name and all that it conjures)  with the hope of timing our arrival at the Cape Fear River to coincide with the tide flood as that will give us a boost with the incoming current for the remaining 10 mile run up river to Carolina Beach.

We understand that there is a restaurant there that will let boats tie up for the night if you have dinner with them.  That sounds good to me so I guess the only question is if they will have room at the dock for Pandora.  If not, we’ll take a mooring in the harbor and explore the town via dink.  Being on a dock would be a nice change of pace.

Yesterday we had a very nice run of about 55nm through some of the most beautiful “low country” we have seen yet.  As a special bonus, we were able to carry a fair current nearly the entire way, something that hardly ever happens.  The only foul current we encountered was for the last few miles before we arrived at the Calabash River as the tide had started to flood.   It was important for us to make good time to get here as there are very few places to anchor along this particular stretch and the only option before Calabash was hours south and the next anchorage quite a few miles further up the line.

Along the way we went through miles of marshes lined with Bald Cypress, so named because they loose their needles in the winter.  We particularly enjoyed watching seeing the wildlife as we motored slowly by.

There were turtles lined up on logs everywhere as the water in this area is fresh.  I wonder if the one at the end started there or was “pushed” along by late arrivals.  “Hey Yurtle, yeah you, move up a bit and make room?”We also saw many osprey nests.  This one was perched on a navigation aid, a very popular choice, it seems.It’s always fun to look at the homes that line the waterway here and along with the huge monstrosities that are such a part of “waterfront living”, we were struck by the color of this one.  Boy, I sure hope that the neighbors like purple and pink.  Yow-za…I’ll bet that they will have to reconsider their paint scheme when it comes time to sell. 

I can’t begin to count how many bridges we have gone past in our travels but I guess that the SC highway department has decided that they need one more.   It surely looks like a huge job .  I wonder how long it takes to complete a bridge of this magnitude.  Years?   We will just have to wait and see how progress is going on our next trip through the area.

Well, writing this isn’t getting the coffee on and Brenda’s up so I guess I’m done for now.