Skip to main content

Sweating in Swansboro


Felix is Hot! - Paris Hilton


Apparently Paris is a big fan of the blog.



She is right, Felix is smoking hot today, it's about 95 degrees in the shade here in Swansboro, NC where we are anchored right out in front of this quaint little waterside town. The Marines blocked off the anchorage at Mile Hammock Bay for training exercises, so we had to push on yesterday and make a 56 mile run up to Swansboro. We didn't argue with them, I know when we're out gunned. We had fairly good luck with the 3 draw bridges and current, and were able to keep the jib up for most of the way. The town here is a welcome relief from the waterway down south. Restaurants on the water where you can get a reasonably priced lunch, free public dinghy dock, commercial fishing/shrimp dock, and also a cool touristy type atmosphere with all the standard trinket shops. Swansboro has yet to be invaded by the hi-rise condos, megayacht attitudes, and the $4 bottle of beer. It's good to see some of the 'old' waterway charm still alive, so we decided last night to hang out for a day here. The dog got a walk on the beach, the cook got a lunch ashore, and I get my afternoon nap.



We've been making good progress lately and are now at mile marker 229, with 0 being in Norfolk and 1015 where we started in Palm Beach a couple of months ago. We've made 306 miles in the last week, and hope to be up in the Chesapeake within 2 weeks. It looks like we'll have some ideal sailing conditions through the open rivers and sounds of North Carolina so we intend to motor as little as possible once we make it to Oriental in a day or two.


The Food Shot Du Jour is Paella made with sausage, chicken, shrimp, mussels, and saffron rice; served al fresco in the cockpit.

Comments

  1. How 'bout that HEAT! I'm an A...........hole

    Oh yeah baby, ooooh Paris, now if I was only 15 again, I could imagine Paris and me together for eternity, ouch oh egads, quit it Laura that hurts!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Hope you enjoy the blog, please feel free to leave comments!

Popular posts from this blog

Pine Island to Fernandina

Sunday was spent idling around the boat taking care of small projects, both of us moving a little slowly after a great time Saturday night with Fred and the acrobatic Rick from 'Freedom'. Pine Island has such a snug little anchorage it was a great place to hang out and avoid the Sunday boat traffic and we were able to scrape the waterline of 4 inch long grass and miniature barnacles that have accumulated already. Star made good on her promise of making my favorite dish after we crossed north of our starting point in St. Augustine. Lapin a la moutarde . For those like me who don't ' parlez vous ' very well, that's Rabbit in mustard sauce. Today we were underway at 7:15 heading north with a couple of stopping options available, but we were staying flexible and had no certain destination. We crossed the St. Johns River and transited the Sister's Creek area at low tide and were on a just barely rising tide for the notoriously shoaling Nassau Sound area. To say

Fourth of July

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll spend all day in a boat drinking beer. We've had a great 4 th , hanging with Wes and little Wes. Fishing, riding in boats, loitering on the sandbar in Jackson Creek, grilling out, and every other fun thing that we could think of. Tomorrow we head to Tappahannock for a little while to stay at my Mom's place and then back to Deltaville to get serious about work. The weather has been great, about 10 degrees cooler than it ever was in South Carolina, and we barely even need the air conditioner up here at night. It's great to be in a sailing area also, unlike Florida where 3 out of 4 boats are power boats, here the marinas and anchorages are full of masts and when you look out at the Bay during the afternoon all you see are sails. Sailboats, sailboats everywhere! Nice protected waters all around, we're looking forward to being able to take some day sails soon. For those who read this a

The Surreptitious Crab Pot

You can not teach a crab to walk straight . -Aristophanes 450-385 BC Travelling the waterway from South Florida up to South Carolina has taught us a lot of different things, but one of the more surprising is the art of crabbing. Having grown up on the Chesapeake, I thought I knew a thing or two about catching crabs, but apparently I didn't understand the stealth involved. You see, the crabs down here have incredible eyesight, a requirement for surviving in the murky brown waters. The local crabbers have needed to develop some especially crafty techniques for working around the blue crab and stone crab's defense mechanisms. One of the first things that a boater notices when watching these crabmen is that the proper color of the float buoy attached to the pot is critical. Bright orange or yellow are out, the crab would see those from down below in his muddy lair in an instant, and avoid the baited pot like a Congressman avoiding his conscience. Likewise red, chartreuse, or any o