Day 16...Carolina Beach State Park to Mile Hammock Bay

SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

     We got up and left at 7:10 a.m. this morning since we knew we were going to try to travel for at least 50 miles today.  Usually the only problem with leaving this early is that it is hard to see the color of the markers because the sun is in your eyes.  Almost as soon as we left the marina, we started through Snows Cut.  There were bluffs of different colored sand on each side of the narrow waterway. 

    

    

     This house definitely fits in the UNUSUAL category.  

There were many nice houses between Carolina Beach and our anchorage.  Some of them had unique statues in their yards and a few had normal ones.

An 8-10 foot tall silver Neptune statue????????

A 20 foot tall giraffe statue

A fuzzy far away deer statue

     One yard even had a motor paraglider with a motor strapped to his back and a parawing strewn across his yard.  He seemed to be having a hard time leaving the ground.

     A woman was walking along as her two beautiful dogs frolicked in the shallow water.

     We needed to have the Surf City Bridge open today since it was only 12’ off of the water.  This bridge is restricted and only opens on the hour no matter how many boats are waiting.  With our luck, did we miss it by 15 minutes, by 10 minutes or by 5 minutes?  NO! We were speeding through the water to make the opening.  We probably got up to 7 knots at least.  We made the 1:00 p.m. opening with 2-3 minutes to spare.  Boy, we were lucky. 

     Later we heard some other boats talking about speeding up to catch the next bridge opening.  One boat asked about slowing down and the other said to come on and “lay a roll by me”.  I’ve never heard that expression before.  Of course, we’ve never traveled on the water through North Carolina before.

     Finally on the 16^th day we passed another boat that was actually going in the same direction.  He was staying in front of us until the wind started to die and we made our move.  OK, so it was about a 40’ sailboat.  He was motorsailing, so we’re still counting it as a legal pass.  Gary told me not to fall overboard taking his picture as he trailed behind us.  He said that he wouldn’t come back to pick me up or he’d lose his spot in line.

     We traveled until 3:50 p.m. and anchored in a place called Mile Hammock Bay with at least 10 (now 11 so far) other boats and us.  The boats just keep coming in.  This is a basin dredged out by the military for use with nearby Camp LeJuene.  We had to stop in a place where Gary could see the NASCAR race.  Sorry the pictures are so fuzzy.  I waited until almost dark to take the pictures of almost all of the boats.

     We traveled for 8 hours and 35 minutes according to the chartplotter and covered 53 miles.