Last night we lifted the dingy. A few moments ago I switched
off the anchor light and turned on the solenoid switch. I have been doing that every
morning for months now. Outside I can hear a sea gull cawing, the sounds of the early
ferry, land birds chirping and in the distance a cricket singing. I suspect that this
is the last time that I will use the anchor light. It is possible that we will
anchor out one more night, but not likely. I am reasonably certain that we have
lifted the dinghy for the last time.

I feel some sadness that this is the end. My daughter has pointed out that this is just
the end of one adventure and the beginning of another. I think that my sadness
has a lot to do with how wonderful this adventure has been. I am in the middle of
going through the 40,000+ pictures that we have taken in 5 years. When we were
doing all the things in the pictures it all happened so easily. Looking back it
seems that we did so much in a short time.

There have been challenges. Things have broken, but we fixed them. There have been
unpleasant passages, followed by beautiful beaches. The challenges have molded us
into better people. The beautiful beaches and the wonderful people along the way
are the things that I will remember.

I plan on taking all of the unpublished blog entries that I have been accumulating
for the past 5 years and filling in the blog. I have the pictures partially organized.
Perhaps it will make a story that Corwin and Chantelle will tell to their children.
Perhaps it will just cement our journey in my own mind.

In any case…

Shalom

This is our 7th time in Ocracoke, but it isn’t until this trip that I feel like I got to know the place. The first time we came it was in the middle of the extremely busy tourist season. I felt like I was in the way of cars and pedistrians. This time we are here at the beginning of the season.

In the five days that we have spent here, Chantelle has gone to her favorite bead store 3 times. She made me a lovely necklace and earrings.

We’ve walked the half a mile to the local grocery store. This is the first store that’s been easy for us to get to in the U.S. Then we had to make all the choices we haven’t been able to have in five months. What kind of chips? Cheese? Meat?

Now that we are back in the U.S. we are running our refrigerator. Our diet is still pretty much the same, except now we can have leftovers. That means we can have more variety at our meals. Before this if we didn’t eat everything it got thrown away. Of course we all had our cravings of things to eat. Chantelle wanted a grocery store Rotessire Chicken. Philip and Corwin wanted steak. I wanted cheesecake.

At Manteo we rented a car and revisited the Hattaras Lighthouse. When we were here two years ago, it was closed and we were unable to climb it. We made the climb and looked out to where our boat has been offshore. It was stunning. Next we went shelling and found smooth, flat sea shells. Then we had our culture shoke by visiting a Harris Teeters grocery store. it was bigger than all of the grocery stores that we visited in the Bahamas combined.

We spent two days at the kid’s favorite museum on the East Coast, the Roanoke Island Festival Park Museum. It’s very close to where our boat is docked.

We’ve been very luck with the weather temperature wise. This has been a cool spring for us. So we haven’t suffered from the heat to much.

We are now in the wind down phase of five years of cruising. It’s always good to have a dream of something to look forward to. After having lived on board a boat for five years, that’s a tough act to follow. Looking forward, Corwin, Chantelle and Philip hope to pursue hang gliding out West

So we found a perfect place to find out if this is a sport we want to be involved with. They have lovely, big, soft sand dunes to launch yourself off of with a hang glider. It makes for much better landings than hard dirt. For four hours we spent 65 seconds soaring through the air!! Needless to say, flying is in my family’s future.

Having 125 V shore power has given me the opportunity to stitch some pictures together.
This is the first one: Sunset in Georgetown SC.

We came into Georgetown, SC at around 1:00am and anchored. The next morning I noticed that there was a piece of metal sticking up out of the water about 100 yards from our boat! Philip didn’t tell me that there was a ship wreck near where we were anchoring. If I’d known I’d have never gone to sleep.

This is the story of the sinking of the sinking of the Harvest Moon.


And a picture of the model of the ship in the local maritime museum.

Georgetown is a very quaint, quiet town. The marina we are at does mostly high and dry storage for small fishing boats. That means the boats are stored on land and when the boat is needed it is lifted into the water. We are the only transient boaters here and have the ,marnia to ourselves after closing hours. The local boardwalk is beautiful.

There is a lovely boardwalk here that goes along the waterfront with interesting stores and restaurants. While we were out enjoying the town, we found out about the ship wreck that we anchored next to.

We are enjoying the advantages of being in a marina. We now have refrigeration for the first time in 5 months. Now that we can store leftovers, we have more variety to our meals. Also it’s truly a joy to be able to use as much water as I want.

We finally made the passage from Bahamas back to the US. This was not one of our best
passages. We left as the first named storm of the year was to the north of us and with
a building tropical depression to the south. The tropical depression is now a 70% likely
hood of becoming the years first hurricane. So it was squally, calm, light and variable, and
far more bouncy with ocean swells that I would have preferred for a passage. Not
dangerous but also not in the very comfortable category.

The important part is that we made it into Winyah Bay, Georgetown South Carolina, in the
dark and anchored by 1:15AM. Anchoring in the dark with unknown circumstances is
not my favorite but it was the simplest place to put the hood down for a few hours.
We considered waiting off shore for dawn but the seas were already building when
we came in.

This morning was the usual set of stuff to get us put back together. First we
listened to NOAA weather radio and found out about the local conditions and the
building likely hood of a Hurricane to the south. If a hurricane comes this way we
still need to be aware of it and prepare in advance. Then we had to get our cell
phone turned back on. That took a while. Then move to a dock and call customs.
Customs was not thrilled that we came in at Georg Town as it is not an “international”
port. However since we came in to hide from bad weather they made an exception
and sent a customs official to us.

We got permission to get off of the boat before he came and get the children
some lunch. Also we all took showers. That was really important! We had some
difficulty with the pressure water system during the passage and nobody had a
shower for 4 days. I think that without showers the customs and border
protection people would have sent us back based on smell. I know that I could
tell in the dark who I was down wind of at a 5 foot distance!

We also had to call our credit card companies and get them to turn our credit
cards back on.

We called Grandma and told her that we had made the US. That made her feel
better! She could not smell us through the phone.

A big part of retuning to the US is the culture shock. The cars drive so fast.
There are green lawns. The bate-and-tackle shop at the marina is bigger than
most grocery stores that we have seen for 6 months. Businesses have air conditioning.
There are side walks! We have not had the Walmart shock yet – but it is coming.