“Fruition Departing!”

“Make all necessary preparations for getting underway!”  For all you Navy pukes, those words mean that you’re heading out to sea, real soon.  For us, it means that tomorrow morning will find us underway for this cruising season.  We don’t have everything finished on our work list (we never will), but this 4-day weather window is just too good to pass up.

"Fruition" sitting pretty from the boatyard, as seen from
our apartment balcony.

Since the yard period took longer than we had hoped, we’re going to hustle during our travels this week.  We’re going to cram 4 normal travel days into two looooong days. We’ll go for over 100 miles/day, and at our trawler speed (Clint calls us a “crawler”) of 10 mph, it will mean some pretty long days.  Tomorrow we’re going “on the outside” to make a straight shot into Beaufort NC across the ocean (hopefully avoiding the live firing exercises within 15 miles of the coast at Camp Lejeune).  The Intracoastal Waterway has so much shoaling that we couldn’t make it in one day, having to time our passage through many areas for mid-tide or better.  Then Tuesday, we’ll make another 100 miles and anchor somewhere in the middle of nowhere.  If everything goes as planned, we’ll be in Norfolk by Thursday night.

Two events this past week showed us just how quaint and “old-fashioned” this town of Southport NC is.  First, we had to get fingerprinted at the local police station (no, we weren’t being arrested), and the Chief of Police himself was helping us.  That is, until he found that he had run out of fingerprint ink a week or so ago.  I guess that there aren’t many criminals in Southport who need fingerprinting!  Then, we went to a Notary to get some papers witnessed, and the notary did not charge us anything.  She said that, instead, we should make a donation to her project of the week – a local stray pet program!  Some people say that Southport is “stuck in the 1950’s”, but that ain’t necessarily bad.

Imagine hundreds of these B-17's flying bombing
missions over Germany

And then, to provide lots of distraction for me this weekend, the local airport was sponsoring flights on a restored WWII B-17 bomber, and it flew over this marina all weekend.  Every time I heard those four big radial engines coming overhead, I ran to find my camera.  Even though the Navy plane that I flew had only one tiny radial engine, I can still dream, can’t I?

For those who don’t know about our travel plans this summer, we intend to go up the East Coast to NYC, then the Hudson River to the Erie Canal & the Great Lakes, coming south through Chicago & the inland river system eventually to Mobile Bay.  We hope to make New Orleans by mid-November (as long as my credit card holds out!)