This blog chronicles our travels, and it contains the good, the bad, and the ugly. There is very little ugly that happens, really, but it’s my intention to be able to re-read these entries ten or twenty years from now and remember what I was feeling, places we’d been, and generally be able to relive these moments. With that in mind, I want to chronicle something that has been brewing over the course of the last month since we left Downtown Sanford Marina, and has really colored my last three days in a not-very-nice way.

For months before we cast off lines to leave Sanford, Florida, we knew “to the day” when it would be happening. I was going to finish playing my St. Patrick’s Day gigs, drive our car north where it would "greet us" when Stinkpot arrived in Havre de Grace, Maryland, fly back to Florida, rest up sufficiently, and then we’d go. It was carefully choreographed. St. Patrick’s Day is always March 17, so everything would fall in line with that. March 18 would be my big driving day. March 19 would be the flight home. March 20 would be final arrangements, goodbyes, and rest. March 21 would be the big day when Stinkpot motored out of the marina for points north. No sooner did I have the plans set, we notified the office at Downtown Sanford Marina of our departure out of courtesy and, truly, obligation. We did allow that things might shift by a day or so in deference to weather conditions or travel snafus, but the plan was set, and January 27th I purchased my plane ticket from BWI (Baltimore, MD) to MCO (Orlando, FL) for March 19th.

Despite our giving notice to the marina of our impending departure, the office still charged our credit card for the entire month of March, as though we were to be there for the full month, and not the ⅔ of a month that was closer to reality. We thought nothing of this since we were sure the marina would be giving us a credit for the days we would not be there when we checked out. When that day came—March 21st—we visited Deb in the office to tell her we were going and ask for the refund. She told us we’d have to deal with Evans, the marina's general manager, about that, but Evans was away on vacation that week. Without worry, and expecting the marina to do for us what virtually every other marina we’ve ever enjoyed an extended stay has done, I sent Evans a very optimistic email and received a cordial response as well as a request for a letter of recommendation for him, which I wrote. Here is the entire exchange, as well as the letter I gave him for his files (I also sent a more detailed version to his current employer as a demonstration of my ultimate respect for his work and accumen):

Hi Evans,
Sorry you weren't around when we were casting off for a proper goodbye. We appreciate everything you have done for us over the last year. 

We did ask Deb if she could deal with prorating the monthly rate for the month of March to credit us for the 10 days we never planned to be there, but she deferred us to you to deal with it. Our card should still be on file. :) If there is any issue, please let me know. We did turn our keys in with Kevin when he was scooting by the boat before we cast off. I trust they were properly accounted for. 

We have had a lovely run down river—sitting at anchor in Jacksonville, about 3 miles from the ICW. 

Be well, my friend. We look forward to seeing you again!
-Dave
___________________________________________________
Morning Dave,
Glad you’re traveling safely and thank you I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind writing me a letter of recommendation, I always a good thing to have in a personnel file.  And I am working with corporate on the prorating the month of March.
Take care and stay in touch
Evans
​___________________________________________________
See attached, and thank you. 
-Dave

After some time of hearing nothing about this, on April 6, I sent another email asking for an update: 

Finally, while we were in New Bern last weekend, I got a phone call from Evans telling me that corporate would not agree to a prorated refund for our March slip rent. He said he wanted to call me and not handle this bad news over email, which I appreciated, but that doesn't negate the fact that this policy is, to me, tantamount to theft. We gave plenty of notice of our departure and even left on the day we had planned exactly. His willingness to try to deal with this on our behalf, to me, also means that he saw the fairness in a partial refund as well. If he didn't, I expect he'd have said so from the outset. 

I told him during the call that I considered corporate's decision to be wrong, and that I didn't appreciate having my pocket picked in this way. I promised to fight it—nothing personal—but the phone conversation would surely not be the last he heard of it.

Downtown Sanford Marina is owned by the City of Sanford and run, under contract, by F3 Marina (AKA, corporate). The first thing I did was email members of Sanford's city management and one or two political figures, including the mayor. The response I got (names redacted) was not at all satisfactory, but contained "additional information" that Evans provided to these individuals to support the decision—and much of it was based on distortions and (surprisingly) flat-out lies:  

So far, since the last salvo, I have heard nothing from the marina or the city, and I don't expect to at this point, but I have to admit that the entire thing makes me sick to my stomach. I can't believe that after over a year of being good citizens and customers that this is how the marina management and city would like for me to feel. I can't believe that this person I really thought was a friend, Evans, was willing to support corporate's decision to the city by cherrypicking the marina own published price list and misrepresenting the agreement we had with the marina to the city officials. It's all beyond the pale to me. 

I have to admit to being very sad about all of this. It has been weighing on me for days, and all I can do is talk about it, which is why I have decided to make it part of the blog. I just need to purge these bad feelings, and I feel that making it part of this blog might be balm for the soul. 

As I write this, we are tied up in Elizabeth City, NC on the free bulkhead by Jennett Brothers Foodservice Distributors. I will fully blog about the latest leg of our journey and what brought us here and now in the next post. For now, I'm going to try to relax and not think about any of this anymore. 

Signed, 
Saddened in Liz City

Today’s a “snowday.” So sayeth the boatswain! Well, not snow, really. It has been dreary, often rainy, chilly (in the mid-50s Fahrenheit—and damp), and we are docked. We don’t often lay out hard-won lucre on marina stays, but when we do, either we really need dock time to cure issues with the boat that we just can’t cure away from land, or it’s a REALLY nice place and we want to spend some quality time getting to know the area. Sometimes it’s both! Well, at least this time.

We have made it to New Bern, North Carolina which is about 25 miles up the Neuse River from the ICW, and we had planned since we cast off lines in Florida to spend some quality time here, so this isn’t a completely unexpected stop for us, but we never expected to be here for a full week, nor did we expect to like it as much as we have.

I suppose I should back up and tell you how we managed to get here first. New Bern is not altogether across the street from Duck Creek, South Carolina, where our previous blog entry left us. To the Wayback Machine, Sherman!

We left Duck Creek on a very nice morning—I remember it well! It was my 51st birthday. The sun warmed us, and the current pushed us first through the Minim Creek Canal and then up Winyah Bay and the Waccamaw River. We were still fighting daily, gusty winds, as we had for most of our trip up the east coast so far, so an early start would get us ahead of the winds coming up on the bay, and hopefully see us to the more sheltered waters of the river before wind might anger the seas. That’s exactly what happened. And we enjoyed the flood all the way up river—and when I say “all the way,” I mean “all the way.” Our day ended about as far up the river as we are likely to ever go, in Conway, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have been keeping close tabs on fuel prices since before we cast off in Florida, and we have known for that we likely would be stopping at Wacca Wache Marina for fuel on our way up river. As it turns out, their fuel price held! We stopped and filled up for $3.55 per gallon, pumped out our black water tank, and filled our potable water tank. We had thoughts of ending our day nearby and dining at the restaurant attached to the marina for my birthday repast, but when we nosed around the corner into the nearby anchorage, the wind was coming up—and coming straight up through the anchorage. I made the snap decision to continue on up river to Conway.

Now, astute readers will remember I predicted back when we flushed our potable water system in Georgia that I would be doing it again soon. By this point in our journey, my prediction was fast becoming a curse. We were plugging new filters on a daily basis with a bacterial slime, and I began shifting our filter system around to try to mitigate the problem. With our full tank of tainted water, we knew what we really needed was a dock with potable water for another extended stay so I could flush and use the new, fresh bleach we acquired during our shopping in Beaufort, SC. We started trying to make contact with the marina in Conway. It just rang and rang when we called. There was no voicemail or answering machine. There was no email listed. After a beautiful run up the river, we arrived at Conway’s free dock, and still no access to freshwater to do the job. We continued to muddle through.

Mind you, the bacteria we have been dealing with is a common, non-toxic slime bacteria, often found in metal potable water receptacles (our tank is aluminum), but it was starting to make every glass of water just a little cloudy.

Be that as it may, we enjoyed our time in Conway. We ate at the barbecue joint by the free dock on our first of two days there, and at a pizza joint downtown called Chanti’s on the second day. The BBQ could win awards and definitely got our “best of Conway” award for the day. The pizza was—and understand this in the spirit in which it is intended—good for Conway.


To wit, four years earlier—during early COVID—we celebrated my birthday in the same town on our way north, and the only food we could get with most of the town closed for the pandemic was, and I’m being charitable as I say this, the worst pizza I have ever eaten. During COVID, even that tasted great because I was sick of my own cooking, but that doesn’t much help the quality of that particular pizza, the best part of which was whatever I washed it down with. The Chanti’s pizza this time around was a pesto, tomato, and chicken pizza, and it was good. Stacey had a meatball sub, as I recall.

We never did make successful contact with the Conway dockmaster, and after the rain cleared out, we headed back down river on Friday, April 12th, still with our water tank stowaway running amok. We ran all the way through Myrtle Beach (near where our friend, Bryan, took the video, above from his back porch) and ended our day in our favorite anchorage in Southport, North Carolina where we also spent two nights. On our first night there, we did dinghy ashore and enjoyed beverages and appetizers with dear friends, and fellow Mainers, Ian and Jen. They loaned us their Honda pickup the next day to run a few errands, for which we are eternally grateful. Still fighting with our slime water, we had intended to get a slip at Carolina Beach State Park for a couple days, but when we called, they waived us off, blaming silting in the marina.

Sunday, we weighed anchor and made our way up the Cape Fear River on the late morning flood and whizzed past Carolina Beach entirely, still with a tank full of slime. We pulled into Wrightsville Beach with thoughts of anchoring there, but with predicted, strong southwest winds overnight, the only anchorage that suited us was too full already. We even tried to drop anchor there, but by the time we had let out sufficient anchor scope for the winds, we were in about 4 feet of water, and it was high tide. No good. We brought the anchor back aboard and made our way to the relatively-nearby Big Lollipop Bay. We dropped the hook in a position where we would take minimal punishment from a southwest wind and settled in. Being a Sunday afternoon in Wrightsville Beach, of course waterskiers and wake boarders tastelessly zoomed around us all afternoon, but we were just happy to have a place to chill away from most of Wrightsville’s weekend hoi polloi.

Mind you, the hour was still early when the hook was finally down for the night, but there was no reason to proceed further. There is a dearth of adequate anchorages between Wrightsville and Swansboro, and, had we proceeded, it would’ve been well after dark before we found a place to end our day.

Monday morning came and we had the anchor up with the sun, making our way to Swansboro. We spent the day adjusting our speed against the incessant current that was on the nose for most of this leg. At issue was the swing bridge at Onslow Beach which ONLY opens on the hour. When I plotted a route to the bridge, I realized if we did 7.5 knots the whole way, we’d arrive just in time for the noon opening, which is why we had to adjust our speed as the current changed. We were passed many times on the way, and some of the more cordial folks we reminded of the bridge timing. The last boat to pass us was one of them, and he slowed down to do 7.5 knots with us rather than spend half and hour bobbing in a current waiting for the bridge to open. There was something gratifying about arriving just in time for the bridge and seeing every boat that had passed us all morning waiting for us.

Sometime during that late morning or afternoon, we did call ahead and got a reservation ($1.50 per foot of vessel length) at the Church Street Dock, which is a transient dock owned by the town of Swansboro. It gets terrible reviews for many reasons, but they have power and (most importantly) water—though the power sometimes doesn’t work, according to the reviews. Other reviews complain about the strong current. By the time we arrived, the wind was once again blowing over 10 knots with gusts to 16+ knots or so, and the current was barreling through the docks. I took one look at our assigned dock with the current and the wind behind us and decided it simply wasn’t wide enough for Stinkpot and waved off. We called to cancel our reservation, and the helpful lady on the other end of the phone line offered us another dock on the other side. We turned around to have a look as this would’ve had us coming up wind and up current, hypothetically a much better scenario. When we came back around and crab-walked the boat back to the docks, we realized the fairway, which ran perpendicular to the wind and current, between that “other side” and the next set of docks was WAY too small for Stinkpot to turn with the wind and the current running together. A “no-go.” We thanked her and asked for a refund, which she processed. We took ourselves and the sentient alien evolving limbs in our water tank to a nearby, well-sheltered, familiar anchorage and enjoyed a very peaceful night there.

Tuesday morning, we again weighed anchor at sunrise and made our run through Bogue Sound on a favoring tide, making the turn up Adams Creek, after Morehaven City, we again had the current on the nose, but the weather was lovely and we enjoyed our cruise. Arriving at the Neuse we put the building wind, current, and seas on our stern and ran up river between two and three footers all the way to New Bern where we had successfully booked a slip. We did have to wait 30 minutes or so for the drawbridge opening, but we were through before long and moving toward our assigned slip. We had made contact with the marina and they were waiting for us on the pier. I turned into the fairway and the boat was immediately crab-walking due to the wind and current. I made two partial attempts at the slip and begged off. There was a dinghy in my way, and there were shadows of the previous day’s docking debacle in Swansboro. The combined wind and current were such that, if I could turn the boat fast enough to set us up perfectly for the slip, they would have carried me in and I would have had no control over any of it—and this boat can’t pivot that quickly anyway. It wasn’t going to work.

The dockmaster was quick on the radio and reassigned us to a slip on the other side of the same pier where I could come up wind and up current. Déjà vu all over again, but unlike Swansboro, there was enough space in the fairway to make the turn without being forced onto other boats or immoveable objects. I pulled up in front of the slip, spun the boat, and had it in the slip in one beautiful motion! We were docked! The dockmaster, Jon, quickly told us to settle in and to not worry about the paperwork until the following day when we could get over to the office. He told me the codes for the gate and the bathrooms and disappeared. We were elated!

We got secured and connected, and I set to work to eradicate the primordial soup from our water tank. Seriously, we could no longer see through a glass of water. It wasn’t making us sick, but it certainly did not seem like anything we should be drinking—and the water was starting to have an off-taste, as evidenced by our level of thirst at the time. I pumped every last drop overboard, then filled the water tank again and pump it overboard as well. All the while, I was doing a power flush to our water heater. On the third fill of the tanks, I put in three cups of very fresh, potent Clorox bleach and proceeded to pump that through all the fixtures. I left it to pickle in the tanks overnight, while we enjoyed the pleasure that is “shore water.” By morning the creature was dead. I flushed the tanks twice more and even dosed the tanks with white vinegar to neutralize the bleach. New filters in place, as I type this four days later, everything does seem to be working perfectly and our water is CLEAR!

Wednesday morning we got checked in, and we have been enjoying this town of New Bern ever since. We did lunch with friends, Michael and Lenora. Michael graduated from high school with my parents, and has been following our exploits for some time on Facebook. A Stinkpot follower and fellow boater, Darlene, kindly took us grocery shopping. We have been walking the streets looking at the 250-year-old homes and buildings, enjoying food and libations in some very nice spots, and just generally acting like we’re on vacation from cruising for most of the last week. In addition to the water debacle, I have also caught up on a bit of maintenance. Friday I changed the oil in the main engines. Yesterday I re-tensioned the engine belts. Tomorrow, I may clean the bowls on our fuel filters and top them with injector cleaner.

Today has been cold and rainy, as I noted, which is why Stacey proclaimed it a “snowday.” We haven’t so much as stepped over the rail today, and it’s now 9pm. It’s funny to consider, but when we’ve been on the boat for days and haven’t had a chance to go ashore, I’d kill to be on a dock like this so I could just stretch my legs, but give me a cold, rainy day, and I can’t be troubled to go ashore. It’s nice and warm in here!

Tomorrow will be another day, and it will be our last day here. I expect we’ll paint the town red one more time, get a good night’s sleep, and get underway headed for points north on Tuesday morning before the winds inevitably come up, as they have been seeming to do every damned day. With any luck, they will lay down enough to let us across Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds before the first of May. We do have a marina reservation in Norfolk on May 5th and promises to keep.

​As I sit down to write, Stinkpot is laying at anchor on the Stono River, a mere mile and a half from Elliot Cut/Wappoo Creek, and a half-hour’s cruise from Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.   The solar eclipse is in progress over our heads, though, this far from the path of totality, it’s not amounting to much except about a half hour of poor charging from our solar panels. It has been a mere 11 days since I last hit “post” on this blog, and that feels like an eternity ago.

Our week on a Brunswick, Georgia dock in a scenic location (Two-Way Fish Camp and Marina) was at once relaxing and fruitful. We received Amazon packages, fixed broken stuff, and generally enjoyed not moving for a little while. After 17 months of (almost) not going anywhere by boat, having that time to decompress from the pressures of being underway, as we nudge back toward being "on-the-move" boat nomads again, really felt nice. On Monday, April 1st, I did drop our dinghy, Li’l Stinker, and took a 5-ish mile round trip run through Governors Cut to Darien, GA, where I towed our folding wagon to the hardware store, a weird Family Dollar/Dollar Tree combo store, the local grocery store, and the liquor store to stock up our rapidly depleting ship’s stores. I left Stacey behind to leave room in the boat for loot. The dollar-store trip was to buy a cooler because I forgot to bring an insulated container of any kind for frozen or refrigerated stuff. I bought a small Igloo that is about the right size for a 12-pack of beer, which I believe is the standard of measurement that is used in these cases.

The furthest of the stores from the dock was the dollar store, which was 1.3 miles from Darien’s town dock. The sun was hot, so I looked for fleeting shade on the sidewalks as much as I could find it. With the goods in tow, I made my way back to the dinghy and to Stinkpot. During the trip to Darien, I averaged about 10 knots with the mostly empty boat. The trip back had me more around 5 to 6 knots with all the stuff and the current, and the wind had come up a little, so I did have a few “wet” moments when hitting small waves, but Li’l Stinker got me back without issue.

Wednesday morning, April 3, we got underway and pointed ourselves northard yet again. Winds, again came up out of the southwest about the time we had the anchor down. Now, captain’s mea culpa, I had dyslexically misread the wind direction on the NOAA weather chart I always refer to, and I had it in my mind that the wind would be out of the southeast, so as the wind started up out of the southwest, I was more than a little alarmed since I chose an anchorage with an, albeit minor (and likely only at high tide), southwest exposure on the North Newport River. It was just uncomfortable enough that I made the decision to weigh anchor after only a few minutes and move over to nearby Walberg Creek—a move that put us in a much more comfortable place for getting a night’s sleep, which is exactly what happened.

I timed our morning departure from the anchorage with the tidal currents to give us both a good run across Port Royal Sound and a good run up the Beaufort River (that's Bew-fert—not to be confused with Boh-fert, which is in North Carolina). We decided to try anchoring in Factory Creek, which we did, and, as a result, we now have a new reason to stop in Beaufort, SC. It was a nice, short hop for the day. We spent the night aboard, and dropped the dinghy in the morning for a few errands. We loaded ourselves and our wheeled cart into Li’l Stinker and made way to the nearby boat ramp, tied up and walked the mile or so to the hardware store (which lacked what we were seeking) and Food Lion which satisfied our grocery list entirely.

Upon returning to the dock, we found Li’l Stinker “beached” alongside the floating dock on rip-rap from the falling tide. We really didn’t think we were so close to the water’s edge that would be an issue, but score one for an aluminum boat. With my shoes off and pant-legs rolled up, I dragged our steed into deeper water, we loaded our purchases, and off we went to the boat.

After our purchases were properly stowed, I broached the subject of getting underway. We had previously considered staying in Beaufort for two nights since it was such a relaxing spot, but the weather forecast was looking ominous later in the week with rain and high winds (again) forecast. I suggested that we might want to beat feet to get up the Waccamaw River where there would be tall trees and narrow, winding waterways to hide from the gusting. We agreed that might be for the best, and also agreed that knocking the first 15 or 20 miles out immediately would not be a terrible idea. So, up came the anchor, and off we went. Within a couple hours, we had the hook down in an anchorage at the southern end of Bull River where we enjoyed a lovely meal of chicken fajita quesadillas followed by a solid night’s sleep.

Monday morning inevitably arrived, and we got underway with the rising sun. The goal for the day was to burn some miles to get us ever closer to the Waccamaw River where we would shelter from the weather and celebrate my rapidly-approaching birthday. With a day of mostly favorable currents carrying us, we did exactly that, though this was a leg of the journey we will be remembering for a LONG time.

After we got underway, Stacey went below and made us coffee that we both enjoyed in the dawning sun on the flybridge. We were running through some “shortcuts” since the tide was high, and so I had it worked out in my mind that after we got back on the ICW proper, right after we moved through Fenwick Cut, I would give Stacey the con and excuse myself to take a shower. It was the perfect place. The waterway would widen up, the channel markers are obvious, the charts are simple. It was a perfect plan, and it’s exactly what we did. I stood up, Stacey took the big chair, I descended the ladder and walked into the saloon, and was about to walk forward when it occurred to me I should answer nature’s call, which I will often do “over the rail” when we are in remote areas such as this. I turned around to head back to the door and found myself looking at a large motor yacht coming around Fenwick Cut at an impressive speed, throwing a huge wake. We keep a set of cheap walkie talkies for communicating between ourselves on the boat, so I grabbed it and told Stacey to “watch her six,” to which she responded with a plea for me to return to the bridge. While all of this was happening the boat was getting closer and it was AIMING RIGHT FOR US! I somehow grabbed the radio and asked for a “slow pass” while simultaneously hauling the wheel over hard to starboard and running the throttles all the way up to get us out of the line of fire. No sooner had I done that, the offending vessel came to a near stop right behind us, and then, in a seemingly sheepish manner (though that might be my imagination) moved past us slowly, never saying a word on the radio before throttling back up and displaying to us the vessel name and hailing port: Mais Oui, Boothbay Harbor, Maine. We were almost run down by one of our own.

​[Read Stacey's version of this nail-biting moment on our Facebook page.]

Mind you, I don’t believe this was malicious. I think they had auto-pilot enabled and just were not keeping an “adequate watch” (not a good idea). Our presence in this secluded waterway somehow surprised them—at least that’s what I hope happened.

I turned the helm back over to Stacey and returned to both the rail and then the shower, in that order. I was shaking from adrenaline, and I still was when I returned to the helm, scrubbed and freshly dressed. Stacey was still shaken as well. This shared experience somehow monopolized our conversation for quite some time as we continued along, ultimately anchoring in the very spot where I started writing this blog entry—within spitting distance of Elliot Cut/Wappoo Creek, near Buzzards Roost Point, just west of Charleston in plenty of time to observe what we could of the solar eclipse so far from the path of totality. Dinner was leftovers aboard (and they were still delicious).

This morning (Tuesday, April 9), after a good night’s sleep, we rose with the knowledge that we would not be getting underway until around 9:30 to get a good run through Charleston Harbor on a favoring tide, and that’s exactly what we did, and we had a beautifully uneventful cruise all the way to the familiar “Duck Creek” anchorage just before the Estherville Minim Creek Canal. Tomorrow we will make our way through Winyah Bay to the safety of the Waccamaw River where we plan to cruise and frolic until the foul weather moves through. I’m sure there will be more stories to tell soon, and with any luck, they will not involve other yacht-folk trying to run us down.