Friday, October 30, 2009

Tonight at Miss Wanda's Alligator River Marina

I'm sitting in the boat with Jazzy asleep at my side and Chuck playing the keyboard to the blues on Sirius Satellite Radio. Way cool! He bought a 61-key keyboard for the trip and plays it quite a bit. I love it and it's therapy for him.

We left Elizabeth City dock around 7:50 a.m. I was at the helm most of the day, avoiding crab pots, while Chuck was looking at the charts. It was a beautiful, sunny day motor sailing Albemarle Sound. At about 10 a.m., the U. S. Coast Guard was patrolling and stopping boats to check them. The pulled up next to us and three seaman boarded our boat. Jazzy went crazy barking, we had to stay in the cockpit while they went downstairs to make sure no weapons were in view, then one of us was allowed to go down to get all our paperwork together.

They were on our boat close to an hour and we lost Bum's Rest. After they departed, I took the helm again while Chuck was looking at charts and checking the GPS and Chartplotter to find out where we were and where we needed to go.

Patti and Wayne arrived at Alligator River Marina at about 12:30 p.m., and we were about an hour behind them. We had a soft grounding in the mouth of the Alligator River, a very small channel that has shoaled over further than the Garmin showed. We were following the preferred line! We tried not to panic and motored off the edge of the shoal under our own power.

Patti and I did laundry and watched the dogs play in the big field.

Miss Wanda's special tonight was fresh-cooked pork chops with choice of two sides and that sounded good to Wayne, so I got off the hook of cooking tonight and we got takeout and ate on their boat. We have a longer day tomorrow to Belhaven, NC.

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