We anchored at Camp La Jeune, an army training facility with occasional live fire training exercises. Because of the exercises, we need to be out of there by 7:30 the morning……. It was a cold night! Wore gloves and hat to bed! I was sleeping quite well until we felt a shudder through the boat. The anchor had dragged across the bay and we were touching bottom on the other side of the bay. Once got all outerwear on, got the boat started and moved to safe anchorage, it was 4:45am. We might as well stay up and get going at sunup.
Today we intend to make it to Cape Fear south of Wilmington. This will give us a jumping off point at Southport into the open sea. That leaves us with another day of traveling ICW. Our trip will take us inside the Caroline Outer Banks.
Once underway we had some charging issues with our navigational iPad, it shutdown arbitrarily a couple times which caused us loss our course map. We did not get the course reloaded. Consequently, we took a wrong turn that headed us off course. Upon learning of our error we turned the boat around the boat in very narrow channel. Unfortunately, the shifting currents made the navigation aids in the words of the Coast Guard “unreliable” on this particular river. After turning around we got stuck rather quickly. The tide kept going out worsening our situation. Alas, we found ourselves in 4.4 feet of water with a boat draft of 6.25 feet, time to call for a tow.
TowboatUS came to the rescue with 400 horse power of persuasion. Jeremy, the driver of the tow boat, certainly gave us the impression that “this was not his first rodeo”. After quite a bit of struggling we got the boat free, Jeremy stayed with us until we back to the proper channel (we needed to be pulled free twice on the way back).
After getting back on course, we recalibrated our destination to Wrightsville Beach, NC. We had to wait for two bridges to open on the way further delaying us. We have been throughly entertained by the channel 13 conversations of the southern bridge operators. Maybe if I had it all to do over that would have been a worthy career aspiration!
We made our destination in the dark. At a great dinner we discussed our plan. We going out into the open water at Cape Fear/Southport. We will be watching weather today and may go this afternoon or tomorrow morning.
