Day 15, Year 8: ICW Mile 244 to Mile 283, Camp Lejeune to Wrightsville
Beach
Date: Sunday, November 18, 2012
Weather: Overcast and VERY Rainy and Windy; NE 20-30, Gusts Higher
Latitude: 34 12.431 N
Longitude: 077 47.963 W
Location: Intracoastal Waterway, Mile 283, Wrightsville Beach, NC
Oh, the best laid plans. They can go awry and the weather can make that
happen, and that did happen to us today. We couldn’t leave Camp Lejeune
until we had good light because the wind was howling and we didn’t want to
have an ‘incident’ while bringing up the anchor. Then we had difficulty
getting the anchor up and got delayed by 15 minutes. That 15 minutes cost
us an hour and a half of time over the course of the day due to the bridge
opening times. We missed the first opening by 10 minutes and had to wait 50
minutes for the next opening. The day then went downhill from there. We
have had pouring rain and winds in the 20 to 30 knot range with gusts to 35.
There were periods when the wind was only 10-15, but those periods were
short and far between. We got to Wrightsville Beach and got through the
last bridge at 2 o’clock. We made the decision to head on to Carolina Beach
which we would reach at 5 o’clock with favorable tide. We got a couple of
miles south and realized that with the negative current and driving rain
that we were not going to make Carolina Beach before dark. At that point we
turned around and headed back to Wrightsville Beach. We called all of the
marinas that we could afford and they were full, so we had to go through
Motts Channel to an anchorage between the town and the actual beach. We had
read that Motts Channel has lots of shoaling and we were a bit nervous, but
we made it just fine. We are in an anchorage with a number of other boats,
but we feel like we are securely anchored. We thought that last night and
yet we dragged a bit, but we have had high winds since we arrived with gusts
to 35 and we haven’t moved. Mark had to get up very early this morning to
do anchor watch, so hopefully he won’t have to do that tonight.
Our other ‘event’ of the day was our little bump-bump-bump-bump across
shallows in the New River Inlet just after leaving Camp Lejeune this
morning. We followed what we thought we should be doing according to the
markings, but at 2.1 meters we hit the bottom. We then bounced a few times
while still moving slightly and then turned and got into deeper water.
Thankfully we avoided a call to Tow Boat US, but we did get online last
night and renewed our towing insurance.
Today’s delay probably means we will not reach Little River until Tuesday.
If the tide was with us all the way, we might be able to make it in 10 hours
tomorrow, but that would be leaving here at 6:30 am at dead low tide. We
are not sure we can get out of here at low tide, so we will just have to see
what the morning brings. In the meantime, we will sit here and listen to
the wind literally roaring all around us.
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| 121118 Day 15 Passage South, USA–ICW Mile 244 to Mile 283 |
