At dock in Southport, NC

We have now spent 3 nights in Southport, we need to recharge our batteries (mine and Ted's as well as Boatel).  On Saturday the best thing that day was seeing the white tailed deer swimming in the water which was truly exciting for me. All of the other 25 -30 boats that we were traveling with us missed it because they had just all passed us as we were waiting for the SeaTow Boat to tow us off our grounding at 8:30 am (that was how our day started). The day ended at dock with us loosing our bow thruster while trying to dock against 25 knot winds and the 8 hours in between weren't any better. Saturday was probably our worst day on the water in 6 years. I was going to blog our day however ever time I start to relive the day, I get upset all over again, so I have decided that we will vanish the day from our memory bank and just pretend the day did not happen and move on.

We are fortunate to have met some very nice people at dock over the past few days,  whom we will meet again somewhere down the water. Jim & Debbie (and Emily) aboard Emily E which is a 67 foot Ocean Alexander were docked here yesterday. We got to share our mutual horror stories of our experience on Saturday with each other. I met Kathy aboard Shearer Adventure lives aboard in Southport and they will be  leaving in December to cruise to the Bahamas aboard their Bayliner. Kathy was so kind to drive me (twice) into town to do groceries.  I bought some cherry tomatoes at the market and they were from Beamsville, Ontario. I had to come to North Carolina to get Niagara tomatoes, and they actually tasted better than the ones we bought at home.

This afternoon the boat lemming fleet started arriving around lunch time with 3 boats from Port Credit, Ontario arriving at dock along with 3 other Canadian boats. We had a few people over for cocktails on Boatel tonight. We we cooked a turkey today so the smell was wafting over the dock. Rested, full of turkey and mellow from the wine we head for bed with our batteries recharged and ready to cruise again tomorrow. Among one of the people we met today was Sophie's owners aboard H2OBO from Port Credit. Here is a picture I took of Sophie a few days ago behind us at anchor. I am told that Sophie doesn't come out very often. Sophie also has a blog at http://h2obo.blogspot.com/  and they describe their bad day too. Seems like a common theme this weekend. Tommorrow we all head offshore - no more ICW for a few days.

Sophie's perched on H20BO

43 degrees at night and 65 during the day, the heaters are on. No snow though :)  We will likely be somewhere in Northern Florida by my birthday (Nov 12). It is said that if you don't go aground then you have not cruised the ICW, so let it be said that we have now officially cruised the ICW this year and we have the pictures to prove it. With that behind us we move on. Next stop Hilton Head, South Carolina. 

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Our little towboat as he leaves us after towing us off. We ran hard aground after we ran out of room passing a barge.