Wednesday 28th October Mile Hammock Bay NC, mile 244.5 (42.5 miles)

Left Beaufort around 09:00 and it was still blowing snotty, creating challenging conditions for undocking the boat. With 15kts on the beam, the fairway narrow and being surrounded by multimillion motor yachts, we had to think this one through. These are one of the situations that cruising becomes challenging. After some serious planning of undocking maneuvers, we went for it and let the wind blow the bow off, gunned it and backed out into Taylor’s creek – without any go faster stripes on big arse power yachts, wheeeew!!!

The exit from Beaufort is a wee bit tricky; exiting easterly we followed the short channel to the Atlantic Ocean and then hooked back west to continue on the ICW. 1 minute later, just as we really depended on our electronics, the chart plotter crapped out, could not find a GPS fix, I hate that.
We grabbed the handheld GPS, one of our many backups, so in true Murphy’s Law style our Master Chart plotter kicked in – go figure, but hey, I’m not bitching!

We cruised on through the very busy commercial port and played twiddley winks with large Army and commercial vessels we survived the gauntlet, no worries mate we play in Norfolk traffic.

On to Bougue Sound, we traveled 20 miles in a narrow channel with skinny water with dunes to the east and beach to the west. The weather varied from .5 mile visibility to bright sunshine, very enjoyable stuff.
Later that day we traveled thru the Marine Corps firing range at Camp Le Jeune, thankfully the lads were not out practicing on this particular day. Semper Fi!
We pulled into the Mile Hammock Bay anchorage around 16:00 and set the Rocna (anchor). Interesting place to Anchor – the Marines have a practice ground here – saw lots of helicopter taking of landings it wore off after 2 hours, a fine meal and a bottle of wine. It seemed as the night drew in they got closer and closer to the mast, ouch that wouldn’t be fun. Slept like logs at this peaceful anchorage (with the exception of Goose and Maverick)

Banana - breakfast of champions...