Last night a cold front had come into the area and we woke to 40 degrees... a bit chilly compared to the day before... Brrrrr!

Delayed departure today due to some issues found during my engine room check... upon entering the engine room I noticed some water puddled in the bilge on the port side behind the engine... tracing back to the water source I discovered the port engine stuffing box bilge pump had stopped working and was overflowing. Our stuffing boxes are within an enclosure that keeps the slow drips of water out of the bilge. The enclosure has a bilge pump in it... when the water level in the enclosure reaches a high enough level the bilge pump activates and pumps out the water... The pump had stopped and the water level reached the point that it overflowed from the enclosure into the bilge... took an hour dry up the bilge and replace the pump (keep spares on hand).

We were underway at 0730... had planned to leave at 0600... oh well... :) Forecast for the day was 15-20 knot winds early morning... diminishing to 5 to 10 late morning... seas heavy chop. Once we got out into the Neuse River the forecast was very accurate and we had heavy chop large enough to have spray come as high as the pilothouse windows... was not an uncomfortable ride just aggravating with the spray hitting the windows.

Couple of sailboats were the only thing we say today while cruising... one had spent the night in Oriental on the town docks across from us... they were still at the dock when we left but noticed them on AIS later morning trailing about 5 miles behind us.

Had another issue just before leaving the Neuse River... suddenly the main electronics I use for navigation went blank... no power to them... had to do some shuffling to switch over to the back up chartplotter... but this put a damper on our planned destination... we were gong to anchor at the south end of the Alligator river... we had to stop early at Dowry Creek Marina so I could sort out the issue with the navigation computer. Susan called the marina and made a reservation for the night.

We arrived to Dowry Creek Marina at 1400 and were securely docked at 1415. Our location for the night at N35°31.969’, W076°32.121’. We traveled today for 6 hours and 45 minutes covering 43.5 nautical miles averaging 6.4 knots.