Even more difficult to work around than bridge clearances are scheduled bridge openings. It was a long day of motoring between red and green markers… straight… red and green markers… turn… red marker… straight… red marker… straight… green marker… straight… on… and on… and on.Īnd bridges… always the bridges. The destination by day’s end was Mile Hammock Bay, a truly unique anchorage. Still, there is no doubt that the cold is stalking us from behind and often it seems to be overtaking us. The weather here is certainly better than what Annapolis is currently facing. Good weather windows seem to be farther and fewer in between. Our late start has meant we need to forego a lot of sidetracking options as we pass from state to state down the East Coast, but we can feel the December weather becoming more and more hostile. It would have been nice to spend more time going ashore and exploring more of the surrounding towns and their histories, but the end of the year is bearing down on us. Anchored off Sugar Loaf IslandĪnchor up first thing in the morning and, once again, we were pressing forward in North Carolina. While sitting only six inches above the bottom didn’t do much to help us sleep that night, it did wonders to boost our deep commitment to Exit’s shallow draft. Trying to stay well away from the other boats, we ended up testing the limits of our draft by anchoring in a spot that put us swinging in three knot currents into an area that dropped to only four feet deep at low tide. Derelict corpses, they now served only as depressing memories in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. It was a quite limited area and already had eight boats occupying space there, two of which were wrecks on the shore and two sat at anchor, barely afloat, decks covered with bags and possessions that looked like they had sat for months. The only other option for anchoring was off a channel between Sugar Loaf Island and the marinas on the opposite shore. The location we had scoped out earlier on the charts turned out to be far too small for us to be able to put out a reasonable amount of chain in fact, it was barely wide enough to get turned back around in! But it did take us long enough that, by the time we got back to the bridge, the tide had dropped enough for our psychological wellbeing to proceed. This gave us time to check out a potential spot to anchor we had just passed up. We needed to turn around and wait until the tide dropped a bit. Just prior to reaching the city was yet another bridge with 65 foot clearance, and the present high tide put our mast within one foot of that… too close for us. It turned out to be good fortune that we arrived at Morehead City early. As we push farther south, currents will reach five knots at times and tides will change by as much as nine feet which will have profound impacts on our ability to safely move at times and anchoring location choices we will have to make. Nonetheless, this is good as well as comparatively benign training for what is to come ahead. It is an immense difference from our initial experiences in the Chesapeake Bay area where tides and currents were almost non-existent. With limited anchorages available and bridge schedules always affecting progress, we find ourselves often having to stop ten or fifteen miles short of where we’d like to get to, or having a ten hour day that stretches from sunup to sundown in order to make forty or fifty miles.Ĭurrents, which are now reaching three knots both with and against you at times, as well as tidal changes of five feet that can control our ability to cross under bridges are always having to be taken into consideration. Just enough of a pause to meet up with with James and Dena, who we finally managed to rendezvous with for the first time since we were stranded with a broken raw water pump in Virginia, to talk about possible plans and drink far too much Kraken rum.įrom Oriental, we made a small leap to Morehead City. We spent only two nights at Oriental and never stepped ashore. If a black-hearted blue water cruiser were cursed by the Devil, and banished to spend all eternity sailing an endless maze of narrow channels fighting tides, currents, limited anchorages, and negotiating bridges barely taller than the mast, that sailor would be sent to the ICW south of Oriental, NC. Though we couldn’t wait to press forward, ironically enough, it was the open spaces and infinite number of isolated bays and river anchorages in the Chesapeake that we sincerely started to miss. By the time we reached Oriental, we had experienced enough navigating through ICW channels to satiate our appetite for as far as we could see into the future.
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