Wrightsville Beach, NC (2013-11-22)

N34° 12.152', W77° 48.261'

Tonight finds us at peacefully at anchor in Wrightsville Beach NC, at mile 285 of the AICW.


We left Oriental yesterday morning, with many extra hands to help get our boat jockeyed out of the spot we had managed to shoe-horn ourselves into the day before.  Of course, after we had spring-lined the boat to reverse out I then noticed that the shrimping boat that had been tied on the fishing dock next to us had moved, which would have given us more than enough room to swing our bow around.  Oh well, good practice I suppose. :-)

The Neuse River was much kinder to us yesterday, with only about a 1 foot swell rolling up the river.  We had a little bit of a rolly ride across the river before we entered Adams Creek, and after that it was smooth sailing for the rest of the day.


I never tire of the variety of the houses that we see along the waterways.  There are modest houses, magnificent houses, and many in between.  Here's a couple that we saw on the cut between the Neuse and Beaufort.

Yeah, we live at the beach...

No, you won't mistake our house for someone elses...

 Shortly after we passed the side channel leading in Beaufort, we noticed a helicopter with what looked like a person sitting on the skid heading towards Morehead.  My first thought was some kind of military exercise, but then the helicopter started hovering above an electrical tower.  It looked like they were doing some kind of maintenance on the tower.  I was amazed at how steady the chopper pilot was holding his hover, not to mention the fact that he held it steady for at least the 20 minutes it took us to go around the Morehead docks.

 We stopped for the night last night in Swansboro, at Dudleys Marina.

A quick trip to get some groceries using the marina courtesy car and then back to the boat to relax.  Dudleys is a great little marina, budget oriented, and stacks customers boats up like a snack food dispenser.

This morning we headed out a bit early, as we had heard there were going to be closures at the Camp Lejune firing range.  I can't go past a military range without having twinges of longing for shiny military toys that go bang...

The last couple days we have been travelling through channels surrounded by very shallow water.  It's quite deceptive though, but sometimes you get a good example of just how shallow the water outside the channel is.  This dog ran alongside the channel for a while barking at the boats passing by.  This was definitely a first for me...

Since we saw our first dolphin on the Chesapeake just outside of the Norfolk harbour, we've been waiting for dolphins to come play near the boat.  We had a few swimming around the boat yesterday as we were approaching the dock at Dudleys.  Today however we finally got our wish and had dolphins playing in our bow wave.  To say the Cruise Director was over the moon about this is a bit of an understatement... :-)

I haven't done a panorama of our anchorages for a while, so I thought I'd do one of the Wrightsville Beach waterfront that we are anchored in front of.