Captain's Log: The Stowaway Won't Go Away

Hanging in New Bern, NC, visiting the birthplace of a sugary beverage that was originally advertised to relieve dys-Pepsi-a. Here's a hint if you ever visit here: don't order a Coke in any local establishment.

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.

Your humble scribe's birthday selfie on Conway's free dock

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.

Enjoying time with our friends in Southport, NC—historic photo from our last time through because we forgot to take a "fresh" photo, though we did find ourselves occupying exactly the same stools.

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.

Stinkpot, making her way into Big Lollipop Bay

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.