July 2006 Vacation Cruising in Coastal North Carolina
Friday, July 14th

Journey: Cape Lookout to Beaufort (View Map)
Nautical Miles: 16.2
Sailing Hours: 1.5
Motoring Hours: 3.5

We awoke today feeling rested, refreshed, and ready to face the ocean again. Small craft advisories have been issued for today and tomorrow, and we are interested in finding a calmer anchorage. We are not alone, for our preparations to leave were mimicked by most of the other boats at anchor.

We had the anchor up, and were facing some big waves before 10am. We motored out enough to give us a good point of sail and had a great ride over the big waves under the power of the wind, all the way up to and through the Beaufort Inlet. It wasn't until we reached the turning basin that we finally turned the engine back on and dropped the sails. We had decided to try to find an anchor spot in Taylor creek, overlooking the main drag in Beaufort. There was a long line of boats, mostly on mooring balls but a few were at anchor. Any open spots we saw had very deep, 15-20 feet, water which would require that we put out too much rode to stay clear of neighboring boats. We continued down toward the end of the line, further from town than we liked, and found an open spot between two boats which seemed sufficient. The water remained deep all the way up to Carrot Island, so we dropped the anchor close to shore in 17ft of water and let out about 120feet of rode. This left little space in the creek for some of the large tour boats coming through. In addition, when the tidal current turned us, there just wasn't enough space for us between the neighboring boats which appeared to have a shorter amount of chain rode paid out.

We picked up the anchor and moved further up the creek, where no other boats would be in our way, but again the deep water right up to the shoreline left us uncomfortable with the idea of a wind-shift which could put Ashiya into the shallows. It was time for us to find a different anchorage.

We coiled the rode on the deck and Sheryl motored us over toward Town Creek. We made it just in time for the opening of the bridge, and finally got the hook down in comfortable surroundings adjacent to Town Creek Marina, right next to one of the other boats who had departed Cape Lookout with us that very morning. We placed a float on our anchor rode, Sheryl rowed a mere few feet to the marina to get ice, and we settled in for a comfortable, breezy night of anchor sailing.