We departed bright and early again today at 0645 with another long day planned going to Carolina Beach, NC. We would put another state behind us and move into North Carolina. We are over half way now… it’s all downhill from here… ?

It was a beautiful day of cruising… the sun came out and never went away… have not seen the sun for about a week. We have had nothing but wind and rain since Florida. So it was very nice to have the sun out with us all day…. AND the wind was way down… saw some gusts to 18-19 knots but most of the day it was under 15 knots… hoping this is sign of what type of weather we have for the rest of the trip.

We planning to stop at Bucksport Marina to buy some of their sausage… I love it… Susan hates it… but they were not open yet as we passed by… SIGH… still have one package left… will have to make it last till our return trip.

Yesterday we had a SeaRay pass us just before Georgetown, SC… when they hailed us to pass they referred to themselves as the “Big Ugly SeaRay”… they were not the owners… they were two delivery captains taking the boat north for the owners… anyway, they had stopped at Wacca Wache last night same as we did… we had left before them and just after Bucksport they hailed us to pass… this time they wanted us to be prepared for a few photos… turns out one of the guys on the boat is a professional photographer and was going to take some photos of SAILS as they passed… they also, offered to send us copies via email… COOL! We’ll see how they come out… loves photos like this and in such an awesome area… they should be good.

Today the Socastee Bridge tender decided to be a control freak… on the VHF we heard a sailboat arrive 20 minutes before we would be to the bridge ask for an opening… bridge tender responded 5 minutes to clear traffic… then the “Big Ugly SeaRay” arrived 10 minutes later… still no opening… we arrived shortly after this and asked for an opening and the bridge tender responded as soon as traffic clears… we waited another 15 minutes before he started the opening… and we were watching the traffic cross the bridge… there were spans when we did not see a single car for 2-3 minutes… sure seemd like he culd of opened long before he did… Then we had a similar thing a happen at the next bridge in Little River… the guide books even have notes about this bridge tender being slow to respond… this was a 15 minute wait for an opening… ?

We did have a favorable current for a good portion of the day… in fact all day long till we reached the Cape Fear River… the bridge delays had caused us to miss our timing for currents here and we hit an ebb tide… and it was a 2 knot ebb tide… really slows you down when you’re only going 6-7 knots to begin with… made the last leg of our trip 2 hours long instead of an hour.

We pulled into the Carolina Beach State Park Marina were secure to the dock at 1800 at N34°03.014’, W077°55.154’. We had traveled for 11.25 hours covering 76.3 nautical miles averaging 6.8 knots.