All Hands On Deck   Adventures on land and at sea

My uncle just sent me a picture of Doc, my dog, from Thanksgiving. I miss Doc but he would not like boat life at all. He gets the starring role here because he makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

This morning, like many mornings, Lee and I are transfixed by our various electronic devises. Lee is working on Boatlogger programming on his computer. After reading the LA times on my kindle over a big bowl of hot cereal, I’m wrestling with the local wifi on my computer. It connects. It disconnects. I manage to read one email. Hey, it’s free internet.

Unlike other mornings, I’m torturing Lee with Christmas music today! It’s December so now I can listen to my favorite Christmas album (Mom, you know what I’m talking about). Thanks to Doug, Pirat has a fancy-shmancy stereo and we can blast our music of choice inside or outside. Outside, it’s “not a warm one”, to quote Lee. Frigid temperatures have descended over North Carolina. The locals tell me this isn’t normal. Everyone here is very, very nice, by the way. Southern hospitality is real and it helps us figure out where to anchor, get free drinks at a local bar, and generally feel welcome in this otherwise foreign land. The owner of a local clothing store even gave me a free hat leash when I told him about losing my windproof beanie.

We spent last night at Beaufort Docks, where we picked up new alternator #2. Lee installed the alternator and it seems to work. It is so nice to have power again!

Yesterday afternoon we moved over to an anchorage on the other side of Beaufort. The guy at Beaufort Docks said this was a good spot and that “the Canadians like it” over here. Well, there are no other boats at the moment, let alone any Canadians. I have a theory about Canadian cruisers, by the way. We see a lot of them and I suspect that they travel south a little later than their American counterparts. Maybe they leave around the same time but end up at the end of the pack because they have farther to go. We are certainly at the end of the pack now. Lee was looking at how far we have to go and estimated that we might get to the Bahamas in February if we keep up this pace. While trudging down the U.S. coast is certainly interesting, we’d rather get to the tropical island part of our journey sooner than February.

Tomorrow we’re leaving the ICW for the time being and sailing down the coast to the Masonboro Inlet. We’ll try to waste some time there before heading to Cape Fear. Our replacement wind generator should show up at a Cape Fear marina, although the company neglected to ship it from England until day before yesterday. Grrr.

These next couple ocean sails will help Lee and I decide whether we’re ready to pick up the pace. We could cover a lot more ground if we sailed in 24 hour (or more) spurts. There is also the problem of figuring out there we’ll be by Christmas. I really, really want to go see my mom and her new house in Seattle for Christmas but to make reservations we have to know where we’ll be and find a safe place to leave Pirat. The fact that Southwest doesn’t fly out of anywhere on our route till Jacksonville, FL is motivation to speed up.

Here’s a little video from a few days ago. Lee is having fun with the new camera.