Vacation From Sailing

New Bern, N35 06 W77 02
Last night is the first night in more than a month that we slept on land. Libby luxuriated by turning up the heat in the motel room because we woke up to a cold morning every day in the past month also.

I know that we’re living life as if it were a permanent vacation. Nevertheless, we decided to splurge and see those places in the outer banks that we couldn’t get to by boat. We left Tarwathie at the Sheraton Hotel Marina in New Bern and rented a car. Last night we slept on Roanoke Island. Before going to bed we went down to the waterfront and looked across at the banks. They were lit up like the Las Vegas strip -- not very appealing. There was an Elizabethan Festival going on in Roanoke over the weekend with period costumes, reenactments, and falconry. We would have stayed for that but then we would have missed the Outer Banks.

See pictures after this post.

We started early at 7AM this morning and drove across the bridge to Nags Head on the Outer Banks. The first impression wasn’t good. First we came to a strip that looks like route 15 in Kissimmee, Florida just east of Disney World. We switched streets to see the ocean, but there was a solid wall of houses that blocked the view of the ocean and nearly blocked the sky. It looked like Marco Island, Florida, a place entirely visitor hostile. Luckily, we saw all the bad stuff before 0800, the rest of the day was nothing but good.

We found an access point and walked out onto the beach. It was lovely. Nice clean sand. Water not too cold. Lots of fishermen and people taking their morning walks with coffee cups in hand. Libby and I love to walk on ocean beaches. When I do it, I feel compelled to walk barefoot in the surf. It reminds me of the two weeks I spent in Recife, Brazil where I ran barefoot in the surf every morning.

Next we went to a state park that featured 90 foot sand dunes and a hang gliding school. I promised Libby that I’d take a hang gliding lesson if she would. The park was great. The dunes are amazing. The sand is very fine. There was no wind today so we didn’t see the sand blowing, nor did we see hang gliders. From the top of the highest dune one has splendid views of the Atlantic to the east and Pamlico Sound to the west. I have several pictures but none of them give an idea of the scale of these dunes.

After that we went to Nags Head Wilderness, maintained by the Nature Conservancy. It is a forest and swamp so well sheltered that one has no idea that he or she is so close to the ocean. It is replete with many rare species of plants. It was delightful.

Then we drove south toward Cape Hatteras. I was happy to see the developed part stop abruptly as we entered the Hatteras National Seashore. The next 30 miles we saw wonderful nature. From east to west one has the Atlantic Ocean, beach, dunes, road, tidal flats (i.e. lagoons and estuaries), scrub forest, Pamlico Sound. It’s pretty no matter where you look. We stopped a couple of times to walk over the dunes to see the ocean. Each time we found splendid beaches. We saw some cars that drove on the beach, men fishing in the surf, and we saw surfers.

60 miles south of Nags Head one comes to Hatteras Lighthouse. We took another hike there, partly in the lagoons and partly on the beach. It was nice again. The lighthouse itself was closed to visitors for the winter so we didn’t climb up. Our memory of passing Cape Hatteras by boat was from last June. We passed the Hatteras marker near dusk, and land was nowhere in sight. That night we sailed north and made Virginia Beach 24 hours later. It must be that the offshore waters there are very shallow for many miles out from the beach.

After the hike near the lighthouse we continued south. Our plan was to take two ferry rides and then return to New Bern completing a circle tour. When we got to the first ferry we saw signs that the other ferries were fully booked. We couldn’t continue. That was a disappointment. Not only did we miss a ferry ride but we had to make a 120 mile detour to return by land. Still it made a splendid day.

On the trip we saw several of the places where we came down by boat. We saw the place where we anchored in the fog, and the Little Alligator River where we anchored the night before that. We drove by the marina where the nasty man was and we made an appropriate obscene gesture as we went by. We could see the place at the Alligator River entrance where we ran aground. By the way I read a footnote in a cruising guide that said that the buoys at the entrance to the Alligator River had been rearranged ten years ago. But, unfortunately, even the newest charts do not show the new arrangement. When I wrote in the blog that we made no errors in navigation that night, I was wrong. A truly professional skipper would buy that phone book size book entitled “Notice To Mariners” and read all the thousands of footnotes about errors and changes on the charts, then make pencil notes on every chart he buys. I didn’t do that; duh. But, I can no longer claim that I made no errors.

Anyhow, we returned to New Bern and Tarwathie by 1800 on Sunday, making the end to a very fun weekend.