St James Marina - Tying off for Matthew

Tide Minders added to all pilings

There is a 4.5 ft tidal range here and with Matthew and the chance of a storm surge, it will be even higher. When we arrived I saw many boats using "Tide Minders". They are a bunch of rollers that you string together on a line around a piling. As the tide changes, the rollers will ride up and down the piling even if there are barnacles present. With the hurricane approaching I wanted all the help I could get.

Back to Miami?!

It looks like Matthew is turning to the east even sooner than predicted earlier. Our windiest day is now projected to be Sunday with winds topping out at 42 kts with an occasional higher gust. That is far from hurricane strength and we feel fairly secure here. However, the ICW through South Carolina and Georgia is taking a beating. When the weather returns to normal next week we are concerned that the ICW may still be impassible due to high water. So I signed up for a month here with the intention of staying two weeks, it was less expensive to take the monthly rate than pay the weekly rate for two weeks. Hopefully, after two weeks they will have the ICW cleared.

St James Plantation - Car rental day

Flowers are still in full bloom down here

Enterprise will pick you up at the marina for free and take you to their office to sign for a car. We've found that the cost of a car for a day is comparable to the cost of a taxi right to and from a grocery store plus you get the use of a car for sightseeing. As is the custom everywhere, if there's a storm coming, everyone goes out and buys bread and water. The bread shelves were empty but were being restocked at the time we arrived with "balloon bread", a white, soft loaf. We prefer whole wheat that's much denser but we made do.

The talk of the marina is the coming storm. Matthew is now predicted to turn even farther out to sea and more people are considering whether it's really necessary to completely strip the boat of all canvass and sails. We will cross that bridge on Thursday. For now, everything is still on the boat.

Calm before the storm?

More boats are coming into the marina. We met a couple today that have an apartment in the complex that invited us over if the weather got too bad. It turns out that the power catamaran they just bought formerly belonged to Mark and Diana Doyle of ICW cruising guides fame. They related getting VHF calls wanting to talk to Mark or Diana (who bought an RV and touring the west). With Matthew heading farther out to sea, we shouldn't have to take advantage of the offer.

St James Plantation Marina - at their dock

Matthew dominates the thoughts. We had a long day but we're safely tucked into the St James Marina. It's a condo facility with lots of three story houses surrounding the boat docks and the docks themselves are about six feet under the level of the land. There is no fetch for any wave action. We're docked at the yellow arrow. The storm surge would have to exceed 10 feet for us to start having a problem.

Still, Matthew is stubbornly grazing the coast. We are at the "2PM Sat" mark on the chart at right. That particular projection has Matthew still over water, at least the eye and we would get the west, less intense edge. But the projections have been all over the place and vary with each model rerun. We will strip the boat on Thursday unless the models wildly change and have Matthew suddenly going far out to sea.




Meanwhile, this marina has Onspotwifi, a new service we have been seeing up and down the coast. When you see that offered, you can depend upon wifi good enough for streaming Netflix. I clocked it at 25 Mbits this afternoon. There's a small restaurant and store on the premises. Even so I've rented a car for Wednesday for a provisioning stop at a nearby Walmart.

The docks and pilings are fairly new and very substantial 

As we pulled in we heard that the ICW in South Carolina was closed and that the state had ordered an evacuation within 100 miles of the coast. There's been no talk of that here yet, we're still in North Carolina. The wifi service will be well used in tracking Matthew!

The ICW along some of the inlets was wild today. The Carolina Inlet just north of Carolina Beach was shoaled in the channel. I took the ACOE route which put me on the wrong side of a green buoy as I entered the inlet but I had 10 MLW! With all the swirling water with ripples (it that a shoal??), it took some courage to trust the ACOE waypoints but they were correct! I had a similar experience through Snows Cut which has also shoaled but I got through that fine also using the ACOE waypoints which can be downloaded from the blog site. I haven't updated Active Captain yet, it's on my to do list. I'll get to it within the next week.

Swan Point Marina - at a facedock

Rustic Swan Point Marina

We had a little over 50 Nm to go so we pulled ourselves together and left at 7:00 am in the fog this morning. Who said only Maine has deep fog? We followed a tug all the way to Morehead City. The challenge of the day was passing by Brown's Inlet on the ICW. It's the home of the famous "S" curve and today it was my turn. To add to the challenge, one of the buoys, the green 61A, was off station. It had slid over within 20 ft of shore. In preparation for the trip south I had downloaded the Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) waypoints to safely negotiate the passage. So I did not care that the buoy was in the wrong place, I just followed the ACOE waypoints which can be downloaded from this blog under "ICW Tips". Just clink on GPX Routes. One will be BBrown. Now the ACOE did do an update on the waypoints in September which I have not yet entered into the blog site at GPX Routes. I'll do that within the week and give the updated route a "2" suffix. There was very little difference anyway in the waypoint locations. The least I saw today was 7.4 MLW.

Swansboro bridge

We passed through two "65" ft bridges today that were not 65 ft! Just look at the photos! We're okay at 55 ft but boats with higher masts may have to pay attention.

Morehead City Bridge

Spaghetti now closer to land!

We picked up a facedock at Swan Point Marina. It's rather rustic but it's situated just right for us between Cedar Creek and either Carolina Beach or St James Plantation Marina. We chose St James to ride out the coming storm. It's a marina surrounded by three story condos with substantial, floating docks.

Here's what grib says, our wind app

The storm was due to go out to sea but now it looks like it will be a direct hit to right at St James Plantation! We will be there Tuesday and then we'll take another look.  We are at that dot just north of the South Carolina border. Yikes.

Important ACOE Updates

Boats have been going aground at Brown's Inlet. The route through hasn't changed that much but the green 61A buoy has moved. The ACOE even charted it's current location. Compare the two ACOE charts below:

From 6/30/2016

Note position of 61A, you pass it port going south

Survey on 9/23/2016

Note position of 61A, it's in the red and passing to port going south will ground you

I would hope the Coast Guard corrects the placement of 61A soon! Until then I'm using the ACOE waypoints.

Look at the complete chart by the ACOE with waypoints here. You can the latest ACOE charts of the shallow spots at by blog site. Just click on ACOE Survey Updates under Cruising Tips at the left. The links will automatically download the latest survey for the areas listed.
Blog site: http://fleetwing.blogspot.com/

The GPX files will be updated in a few days although there's not much change at Brown's Inlet, it's just that 61A is in the wrong place.

Cedar Creek - at anchor

We've had nice sunsets this year

The weather was perfect for traveling today. The threat of thunderstorms disappeared and the sun came out with winds of only 5 kts. We've had some rough trips down the Neuse River. It can get very rough with winds opposing current in the river but today it was as calm as a lake with no wind. We had a long day yesterday so we wanted a short day today. We dropped anchor about 12:30 and relaxed the rest of the day.

Here's Hoolie's  beach

As you might expect, we watching the Matthew closely and we want to be further inland, away from the area of North Carolina that pokes out into the Atlantic. So the plan is to take a dock at Swan Point Marina, then Carolina Beach followed by either St James Plantation or Barefoot Landing and then take a close look at Matthew for our next destination. So far the spaghetti projections still have it taking a right turn into the open Atlantic and away from land. I hope they are right!

Still projected to miss the US

Meanwhile, I have some challenges tomorrow with the first of the shallow waters. Brown's Inlet is first up with reports on Active Captain of boats going aground trying to follow the two buoys in the famous S curve. One boat reported that the green buoy off station. I'll get a personal view on Monday and I'll report back here on what I find. I have the ACOE waypoints loaded that are available from the blog site and if the buoys are off station, I'll just follow those waypoints. Unfortunately, I'll hit Brown's Inlet with a falling tide, oh well.

RE Mayo - at their dock for $0.40/ft

Dodging storms at 7 kts! It can be done with planning and radar

We had intended anchoring at the Pungo River but when we reached the anchorage at 1:00 pm we decided to push on to RE Mayo. Once again the storms were all around us none hit us. We seemed to be the only boat out today and when we reached RE Mayo a few minutes before 5:00, we found it deserted. We took the dock right next to the only 30 amp outlet and were snug for the night. Note that RE Mayo is not for everyone. It is not a marina, it’s just a facedock where you’re likely to have no help docking. They really don’t take reservations, just drop in and tie up and then visit the office to pay. You’ll have to step over the bad parts of the docks but then that’s part of the RE Mayo experience. Inside you’ll see a wide selection of everything you might want if you run a 70 ft shrimp boat!

It's a working shrimp dock, everyone's in today

RE Mayo is closed on Sundays and they close at 5:00 on Saturday so I got there just under the wire. We are very fond of their seafood which is the major reason for taking a dock there. They flash freeze food they’ve caught so we stocked up on shrimp, scallops and crab meat. We’ll have a feast later on.

The docks here are not marina quality and not to everyone's liking but it's fine with us for the price and seafood

Needless to say, we are closely monitoring Matthew which is coming up the coast. The spaghetti projections still have it staying off shore but we still hurried to get through the North Carolina bays which stick out into the Atlantic. We will go over the last of the bays on Sunday and anchor in Cedar Creek and then reevaluate Matthew and our plans for the rest of the week.

Multiple models are all tracked here, most have Matthew going out to sea