We departed from Swansboro this morning at 0715 along with two other boats... a 56ft Krogren "Privateer" and a 42ft Krogen that was docked at the Swansboro Town Docks. Both boats leaving just ahead of us... which was good as they both would be running faster than us.

Beautiful day... bright and sunny with a light cool breeze... virtually no waves... :)

One strange thing happened today while in Bogue Sound... the boat "Privateer" hailed us and said they had slowed down due to an enormous amount of stingrays in the water and that they were actually hitting their boat bottom... I thought this was strange but acknowledged and sure enough when we reached the area they had reported... there were hundreds of stingrays... and they were hitting the bottom of the boat and the props... of course this was killing them creating a lot of blood in the water behind us... never saw anything like this before... have seen the rays in large numbers when they are mating but never had them not avoid the boat and especially our props... felt so bad we were killing a lot of them but there was nothing we could do to avoid it.

We planned to stop in Oriental today at the free docks but we arrived to the area so early in the day.... 1300... and with the Neuse River being flat calm... which is rare... we opted to continue on.

We arrived to our destination for the evening at approximately 1530 and dropped anchor in Gale Creek... Anchor secure at 1545 at N35°12.579’, W076°35.483’. We traveled today for 8 hours and 30 minutes covering 58.9 nautical miles averaging 6.9 knots.