Battery Problems in Wrightsville

Thursday November 6th: Swansboro 

We anchored in Swansboro and then immediately lowered the dinghy and took it into the town's dinghy dock so as to stretch our legs and have a look around. Bob is locking up the dinghy. Sea Change is in the background.

Friday, November 7: Wrightsville, NC

We've left the creeks and rivers behind and we're traveling through dredged channels and marshes. Money for dredging is scarce and the guidebooks warn of shoaling along channel edges and shallow spots at low tide. Here we watch depths with extra vigilance and keep to the channel within the wider waters - as shown on our GPS chart.

The restrictions of a narrow channel require cooperation among boaters. VHF channel 16 is used by fast boats to signal a pass by as in "Sea Change, this is Big Boat on your stern. I'd like to pass you on your port side. If you back off (slow down), I'll give you a slow pass by." Slow boats like us acknowledge, comply and say thank you. On occasion a fast boater will roar by leaving a slow boat tossing about in the wake. Then the VHF comes alive with angry recriminations. "Big Boat, you are handling your boat in an unsafe manner. It is customary to slow down when passing another boat!" Less decorous words are sometimes used.

There is a tendency to more chit chat on VHF channel 16 than we are accustomed to. For non boaters, channel 16 is a hailing and distress channel only. Users are expected to switch to a "working channel" for any other conversation. Some here take the attitude that if their exchange is short, why switch channels? When asked to move off 16 by a fellow boater, I heard one caller respond, "Put your big boy pants on. We weren't very long!" Listening to the VHF can be very entertaining.

We heard another interesting exchange on the VHF yesterday. A group of 10 boats had been waiting for over 30 minutes for the ICW to re-open at 3:00 p.m. (as had been promised). It had been closed by the LeJeune Training Camp for use of their rifle range. They shoot across the channel! When the captain of one of the boats called to inquire why they were not opening, he was told that the new time was 4:00. Since by 5:30 boaters should be anchoring or pulling into a marina to be secure before dark, a 4:00 opening was problematic. The military spokesperson said that he was just "following orders". The captain then called the Coast Guard to complain, saying that the extended closing was creating an "unsafe situation". We didn't hear any more because, at the time, we were anchoring ourselves but the caller was, in fact, one of the group we had for drinks on our boat a couple of days ago. He has spent part of his work life in the merchant marine and knew that he had a right to challenge the cavalier closing of the waterway. I don't think that he got far that day as he, and I assume the other boats were unable to move on and doubled back to find an anchorage before dark, but he said that he would be writing a letter to the person in command. (I use the word "Captain" here to refer to our friend since we've heard it so often on our travels south of the border. Men on boats are called captain, or "cap" by dock attendants, marina personal, etc. There's a bit of a struggle when they search for a word to address women on board.)

To time our own pass by the Camp LeJeune range, we got up at 5:30 am yesterday morning to listen to the Coast Guard "Notices to Mariners" which communicates when the ICW will be closed and also warns of areas of the channel where shoaling has become a problem - at least that's what we read. The announcer spoke quickly, ran his words together and was completely unintelligible. It sounded like gibberish to us and we were none the wiser. However, when we passed by the area about 8 am, there was no activity.

We anchored in Wrightsville yesterday afternoon. We haven't lowered the dinghy yet, but this looks to be a fairly large centre. This morning while I cleaned out grubby crooks and crannies, Bob has been grappling with our recurrent non-starting engine. More often than we'd like, he has to start the generator to get the engine to turn over. After much poking about and engine stopping and starting Bob thinks that we might have a faulty starting battery. He's still testing.

Bob has confirmed that he can get a replacement battery from West Marine. Possible next problem - how to get the battery off the boat and then to the West Marine in neighbouring Willimgton. There's a bus that goes there but a battery is awfully heavy. Perhaps a cab? We'll see what the "Cap" has up his sleeve.

Work Day in Oriental

Bob thinks that he has solved the problem of water leaking into the forward cabin. It has certainly helped that we are in a marina and close to services. With the heavy rain which began in the afternoon of the day before and continued through the night, we found that again, the bow end of our mattress and bedding was wet. So we pulled everything off the bed and Bob took off a piece of wooden trim in the cabin. When he opened up the anchor locker hatch and felt a draft in the cabin, he knew there was a hole somewhere. Then he took everything out of the locker, stuck his head as far down as possible (basically stood on his head he said), looked around and found a couple of relatively large holes and some smaller ones. Most of the time, water doesn't get into the anchor locker - except of course in heavy seas and extra heavy rains. Since we have Internet access here, Bob went online for a solution. Then he took a long walk to the hardware store and bought an insulating spray foam which once sprayed on would expand to fill any gap. In the mean time, we stripped the bed, and took off the cover for the mattress to dry everything out and wash the sheets and duvet cover and we put on the heater in the cabin to help dry everything out.

We are also finding that condensation on the walls and ceiling (when we close the boat up especially) is worse in our cabin - probably because there's 2 of us in the cabin all night breathing out moisture. As a result, there is dampness underneath the mattress which is unrelated to the anchor locker problem. At the next stop where we can find a big West Marine, we'll buy a piece of underlay which is made to absorb moisture under a mattress and can be removed periodically to dry out.

The marina has laundry facilities very close to where our boat is so that made it easy to catch up on all our laundry and wash all the bedding. We also walked the mile or so to the grocery store and did a big grocery shopping with the intention of taking a cab back. When Bob asked if they had a phone number for a taxi, the owner offered to drive us back. Nice!

After getting everything back in order - the bed put back together, the laundry put away, the groceries stowed, we went out for dinner. The gentleman who drove us back from the grocery store gave us some restaurant recommendations that were "right good". We went to the closest one and had a feed of "peel and eat" fresh shrimp - Mmm good and very reasonable. I was wishing I had my camera so as to take a picture of the one pound of shrimp on each of our plates. We brought home the leftovers and had a yummy shrimp salad for lunch.

As we travel along we are seeing more and more people going south and since we see them again and again, we have begun to get to know some of them. This afternoon, one couple offered us their bikes to take for a ride. We have bikes but hadn't gone to the trouble of pulling them out. We biked out along the water and into a beautiful housing area with a variety of pretty homes in all shapes and sizes and lots of tall trees and grasses all around. We have decided that when we are docked any place for a day or more, we'll make a point of getting out the bikes.

This afternoon, we have invited 2 couples for drinks before dinner. They were both with us at the Dismal Swamp Visitors' Centre and then again at Elizabeth City. Tomorrow the winds are predicted to get lighter in the afternoon so we will leave later in the morning and move further along the ICW's magenta line.

Really Raining in Oriental

Monday, November 3rd: Town of Oriental

Along the canal joining the Alligator and Pungo rivers

I have to confess that before we started on this trip, in spite of reading descriptions, I had no clear idea of what the Intracoastal Waterway really was. Now we are experiencing the reality of the connected waterways that allow boats to avoid traveling in ocean waters as they make their way south (or north).

Last night as I was flipping through pages of our charts to find way points, I listed parts of the waterway that we would travel through today. From the Pantego Creek where we were anchored (just outside of the town of Belhaven), we would go back into the Pungo River where we had traveled yesterday, move further along it until it empties into the Pamlico River, then cross the Pamlico to Goose Creek going down the creek and then into a man made canal connecting it to the Bay River, then out the mouth of the Bay River, briefly again into another arm of the Pamlico and finally into the Neuse River where we would stop at the town of Oriental - so - a creek to a river, then across another river, then a creek, a canal and 2 more rivers.

Canal joining Goose Creek and the Bay River

On paper or electronic charts, a magenta coloured line indicates the ICW and when we follow it, we are sometimes winding around the banks of rivers and sometimes traveling down arrow straight canals. This leg of the ICW through North Carolina is quite lovely but we hear that as we get closer to Florida, the ICW is more often called the "ditch" with all the negative connotations that implies. We'll see.

Our stop in Belhaven was brief. We took a quick run into town but everything except an ice cream shop was closed (it was Sunday!). Luckily, the shop had WiFi access so we shared an ice cream, had a coffee and read our email.

We're in shrimp boat country now.

This morning, we left early to avoid the heavy winds and rain predicted for the afternoon. Just after lunch, we were beginning to feel the effects of the coming "front" and the Neuse river was choppy - the Neuse is another wide but shallow waterway where strong winds can make traveling uncomfortable.

The anchoring area behind the breakwater in Oriental is tight so we decided to go into a marina. Now that we're tied up, it's great to be secure, out of the heavy rain and winds, and near facilities and stores - but the tie up process was not much fun. This is one of the 4 pilings with mini dock situations and we still can't figure out how to manage it all. Again, the boat ended up rubbing against pilings and was all askew until we finally got everything in place. How do people do this anyway?? I guess eventually we'll get the knack of throwing the line into the air high enough (and fast enough) to get around those tall pilings as we go into the slip. Why don't they make the pilings a bit lower for people like me?

Typical mini dock - the town dock in Elizabeth City was about half this size.

The dreaded pilings

We are going to the marine store tomorrow to buy another long line - we have always had enough lines for any docking situation on Lake Ontario but here you need at least four extra long lines for wrapping around pilings. Today Bob ended up tying 2 of our shorter lines together to make a fifth long line - to act as a spring line to run back to a rear piling. The idea is that you wrap the line around the piling and bring it back to the boat so that you can easily pull it in as you leave.

While the wind blows hard, we'll use the next couple of days for boating chores - laundry, groceries and boat clean up and fix-up.