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.