April 7, 2014.

We wanted to make a longs days run to put us as close to Oriental, NC as we could. The Wrightsville Beach Bridge only opens on the hour so if we wanted to make the 0700 bridge we had to pull the hook around 0630.

A boat had slipped in to anchor behind us during the night and it turned out to be the catamaran from the day before whose davits had failed while out in rough seas. It was too dark for a picture but his starboard davit was broken and his solar panels were hanging down to the waters surface. We learned later on the VHF that TowBoat US had gone out and towed the guys dink in for him and he was able to get the big boat in by himself. The towboat guy was on the radio later that morning telling him where he might get his davits repaired locally. If it were me he'd have to tell me where to go to get my wifes foot surgically removed from my ass after having her out there in conditions such as they were.

There was a ridiculous ground fog as we made our way northward. It was so thick we had to use the radar to keep from running into the channel markers. The four bridges that we encountered all had an opening schedule and we spent close to 2 hours waiting for bridges to open. Waiting for bridges was really screwing with my schedule as envisioned.

About 20 minutes before reaching Bogue Sound, NOAA started broadcasting a weather bulletin about a vicious line of thunderstorms racing up behind us. Christy had already seen them on her I-phone and had estimated that they would overtake us in about 3 hours. NOAA was assuring us that we'd be seeing 30 to 40 knots winds along with severe thunderstorms. They also said that winds up to 58 knots had been recorded as the storm moved towards us. Crap.

I wasn't going to risk be overtaken by the storm with sail up so we continued on under motor alone. Bogue Sound is a 20 mile long channel cut through the middle of a VERY shallow body of water. We had gray skies all day and things started to look worse as we looked over our shoulder. The wind was blowing 25 and the Veranda was actually healing as we motored along with no sail up.

Christy prepared dinner while we were underway and had it coordinated to be ready right as we were due to drop the hook.

We slipped into our tiny chosen anchorage, dropped the hook, ate dinner, secured everything on deck just as the front reached us. The wind howled a bit but nothing too severe, it rained like a bitch but all in all it wasn't too bad. The temps rose to the high sixties and we even got the Cape Fear salt and the pollen off the boat. Not too shabby.