Southport - Deja vu? (Hope not!)

 

This is the Figure Eight Island Bridge, just prior to where we turned off to anchor Saturday afternoon. A large go-fast boat had zoomed by prior to this bridge, leaving us to slog around his significant wake - the first irresponsible boater we’d encountered thus far. After we recovered we continued our slow pace towards the bridge. As I had done my homework, I knew that the bridge would not open for another 45 min but the numbskull on ‘Blackened Dolphin’ was clueless and found himself sitting there waiting for the opening. I just smiled. 

We took our time leaving the anchorage at Middle Sound as we had a relatively short ride to Southport. 

We took Snow’s Cut to Cape Fear River and at the end of the cut it felt like we were running a gauntlet - weaving back and forth around buoys. No time in there to get pictures!

Arrival at Morning Star Marina was tricky…not much maneuvering room, a bit of traffic and a wicked current added to Kathy trying (and eventually succeeding) in wrestling the dinghy up to now for tie off out of the way and my trying to keep control of the boat while awaiting instructions from Marina. We found the assigned slip but in the chaos I had misunderstood instructions so had told Kathy to put dinghy on wrong side of the bow so now it was in the way!  Kathy went back up to move it but wind had already won the fight and so no choice but to just get in to the slip.  With a bit of help from dockhand it all went smoothly enough - no yelling or crashing.

The last time I was in this marina I was on the Albin and had issues with virtually everything related to the prop shaft.  Two weeks on the hard and $10,000 later Kathy had joined me and we took off for now rushed trip home and I started making calls to go back to work!  None of that on this trip - everything working great so far!

I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon planning out itinerary for next few days to get us to Beaufort (pronounced bufert in sc,  bofert in nc) while Kathy managed laundry duty.

We inquired about rides to grocery store…was going to end up costing $35 or more so we instead opted for grocery delivery from Walmart - $10 for delivery, $5 tip - no brainer!

We are enjoying a rainy layday at the marina - no chores today as we’ll be in a marina again tomorrow and can fuel up and top off water tanks then. 

All pics from today’s blog are courtesy of Kathy.