Southport, NC

[Kevin's Post]
We got up at 5am today (no, we don't sleep in every day) in order to get under way at first light. We had planned to go out the Winyah Bay inlet outside up to the Cape Fear (Cape Fun & Games) river which is a distance of about 100 miles. One of the disadvantages of going outside on the ocean is that there aren't always a lot of places to come back in off the ocean. So once you're out, you're committed to staying out until you can get to the next good inlet. But the forecast was good, and with over 14 hours of daylight we were pretty confident we could make it all the way to Cape Fear before sunset. So at 6 am we hauled up our anchors along with about 50 pounds of Georgetown mud and got going. Within a few hours we were out of sight of land again for the first time since we crossed over from the Bahamas. It's pretty cool looking out and seeing nothing but water in every direction. Most of the day we were completely alone, with an occasional power boat zipping by at a distance of a few miles. We saw a few dolphins as we usually do. We tried to fish but caught nothing, also as we usually do. We did have some excitement when Amanda spotted what appeared to be a dinghy adrift about a mile away. Dinghies are expensive, and people are always losing them. Most sailboats drag their dinghies behind them and it just takes a knot to come undone or a line to chafe through and it's gone without you even noticing. We altered course to intercept it, but as we got closer we could tell it was just a pool-toy style raft that had probably washed away from one of the beaches 20 miles to the north. We decided we should probably get close enough to make sure nobody was in it. There wasn't, but hey you never know. We had a good breeze this morning, and were able to motorsail with one engine, but by the afternoon the wind had pretty much died so we had to run both engines to keep our speed high enough to ensure a daylight landfall. Then, of course, just as we are getting to land, we have 15-20 knots of wind behind us after it was too late to make any use of it. Tonight we are anchored in a creek near Southport, NC just off the Cape Fear river.