First thing in the morning, Elana came over to say good bye since they were pulling out, heading south. We debated leaving as well; however, we had significant work to do before we would be ready to head out into the ocean. It is amazing the amount of stuff that comes out from storage when you are in a nice, peaceful anchorage! We had our work cut out for us for the day.
Storing everything is actually relatively easy, if a bit tedious. We managed to accomplish this task in surprisingly little time! We ran into town to get a new binder for our home made off shore log, and wound up also stopping by Satan's Breath, a hot sauce shop. When we got back to the boat, we tried spinning the boat with our dinghy since the anchor chains had become twisted. This did not work, to say the least.
We had a few free beer tokens that we kept forgetting to take with us when we left the boat, so since we knew Annual Hope was going to stay for another week we planed to drop them off to them before we left town. Mike suggested that we head over to Moorehead City after dropping them off. So we then pulled over to Annual Hope and dropped off the tokens, Rick and Evelyn insisted that we at least have a beer with them and see their boat. We told them we where off to Moorehead City, so they suggested that we stop by on our way back.
Off to Moorehead City we went with Mike at the helm of the dink after clearing the idots that had anchored in the Beaufort channel to fish. This can always be a problem, but so far NC seems to be the worst area for this that we have been to. This is dangerous and illegal as a large ship would not have the time to turn before hitting them or a smaller boat could run aground if there is not enough room to clear them and their anchor rode, or hit there anchor rode and cause both of them problems . Anyway back to the topic, after entering the Moorehead City channel the dink started to run out of gas. We moved over to the side of the channel and switched fuel tanks (this is a easy and fast process) and headed off again. Well we had forgotten it was the weekend and everyone was out. Needless to say the traffic and wakes were incredible, so we figured that it would be safer to just head back, since most of the traffic was sport fishing boats that where seeming to be under the Damn the Torpedo's Full Speed Ahead mentally with no consideration for anything around them as we watched about a million accidents almost occur.
After taking on gas for the empty dink tank, we pulled along side of Annual Hope to take them up on that beer. Mike accepted a beer while Evelyn fixed hot chocolate. We received a tour of their boat, that they refinished on the inside themselves. We got some ideas for things that we would like to do to our boat. We wound up spending several hours there talking about plans for traveling, and goals of places to visit over the next several years.
We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing until we put the dink aboard, stored our fenders and covered it. We were now ready to head off shore again.
We watched the weather, pulled weather faxes as well as Navtex. From what we could see, our weather window would be closing after Sunday, and would not open again for at least a week! We decided that Sunday would definitely be the day to go!
Voyages