The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway is a bizarre lesson in the surreal.
…The (all too) real…
…And the, “I’m totally done with this shit!”
If you’ve been with us you know we like to anchor our boat…
and the more remote the anchorage the better.
Sometimes in the ICW we’ve anchored in the packed…
And sometimes we got it all to ourselves without a single boat in sight.
The McMansions that dominate the view to one side of the compass…
…are simply forgotten on the other.
Because we prefer a safe, secure, but empty anchorage, we end up stopping in some strange places. Sometimes, though, the ICW and weather constraints put us in queue with other southerly travelers.
A combination of the forecasted storms and our desire to avoid repeating parts we’ve done too many times already sent us the Alligator and Pungo River route, rather than around to Manteo in Croatan Sound. We still lost most of the traffic by being so damn slow, and only two other boats chose to stop before the Ditch portion of the river.
Our anchor held securely and we watched the Full Beaver Moon total eclipse very early the next morning…then went back to bed.
By the time we took off, things were looking pretty good up in the river.
And even a sail-assist doesn’t make us fast.
The part of this journey that feels interminable, the motoring-sailing through ditch part, is almost over. We’ll be heading offshore from Beaufort Inlet and both our pace and our mileage should improve greatly!
The boat and her systems are performing beautifully and our heading is a preferable South. On and on we go, like life itself, with the wind and the change.