Just got back from the coast of NC - Beaufort and Atlantic Beach - for a wedding...Beaufort is a charming small town, much preserved from the 1700s and 1800s as a port...saw a number of wild horses on one of the barrier islands.
Glad you had a good time. I stayed at Beaufort Town Docks on the way South to Florida. Walked the dock area, shops, restaurants, very nice, very old.
Reminded me of the older parts of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. On the way back North was chased by an awful offshore thunderstorm with
constant lightning right behind the boat, going flat out to make the inlet there, past Morehead City. Once I got up to the little cut before the Neuse River,
calm returned. For about an hour until out of the cut we went. And then the Neuse was choppy as could be and was throwing our 25 ton boat around like a cork.
That river has some serious issues with wind opposing current from multiple directions. After calming down from the lightning, now we were getting tossed around in an area we thought would be a nice calm river to cruise on. Wrong. By the time we got to Belhaven, getting beat up the length of the Neuse River, I was ready to stay at that dock for a few days. And we did. Important to keep the Commodore happy. She was ready to get off the boat and rent a car driving home. North Carolina had not been easy on us. And the Currituck Sound was shallow too, though so very beautiful.
My neighbor has boated down in the Beaufort area and has taken pictures of the horses from his boat. Really neat they are still running free.
if I may digress...
When we made our Intracoastal trips to Florida we were on the water 30 days going South. Got a chance to see a lot of ports. Always found a nice marina, no anchoring out except for lunch and usually ate that in a no wake zone that were common in many areas. Funny I remember eating my lunch idling past Savannah, all those private docks causing the radio to crackle at times with demands to slow down and naming the boat name. Clearly someone had good binoculars. I only got yelled at once, by some bozo bad driver who called me a "menace to the waterways" on the vhf; I thought that was rather charming. He wouldn't move over so i just slid on past one or two knots overtaking speed, as utterly slow as possible, and poor baby he rocked a little. Because he was stubborn and had a 7 knot trawler while I had a 16 knot planing boat. I always wanted a little plaque with that quote on it. Me who slowed down for anyone, never rocked sailboats, and had taken piloting courses and understood right of way. Now let's see, if you drove your car down the middle of a two lane road right in the middle, and someone tried to get around you, would you call them a menace? I can only imagine how Captain Slowpoke Hogging Channel drives his car. Probably an exact speed limit guy. Sigh.
ok, that's TMI
but I did keep a daily log and I have it in print. My wife made me do it every night on the laptop. Creatively named Trip South and Trip North. Could have been Down and Back. Three years apart. A great adventure and despite a few bent props in shallow areas of the Intracoastal, including one nasty rock ledge, ooohhh, that baby felt really solid as we thudded over it, trying to get out of the way of a pushed barge coming at us in a narrow channel. Might has right and I was tiny compared to that barge. Well, let me get just a little bit further over, to be safer. The rear of the boat came up several inches when we crunched over that, bronze props bending into pretzels. Thankfully I carried spares. And the trick was getting the spare props fixed and shipped to a port ahead of us, meeting up with us, getting them back on board, before we bent them again. Always in the channel, always because something was under there that wasn't on the chart. Like a big sandy ridge caused by a nearby ocean inlet. That's when you forget the charts and start looking carefully for the small temporary buoys and markers put up, marking shoaled areas.
now that's way tmi...I could tell sea stories for a while...
