On Tuesday, Nov. 6th, we left Dowry Creek for Oriental, a small town of 800 residents, also along the ICW. This was a long, wet, windy and cold day, the coldest yet. Joanne had 3 layers on the bottom and six on top! The boys did a great job navigating through the many range markers, and kept us floating! If you wander off the path only slightly, you'd be aground pretty quickly. We're not used to depths of 6 to 15 feet in large bodies of water so were watching the sounder continuously. Oriental is a wonderfully friendly little town, everyone so willing to help and make you feel welcome. We walked about a mile up to the grocery store, and as we left, a fellow in a van asked if we were going to the marina, and would we like a ride. We'd bought more than we planned to, so we were happy with this offer, and when we thanked him, he just replied "that's what we do here". There were gale force winds forcast for that night and next day, so we stayed two nights, but the wind di dn't amount to much and we were ready to leave early on Thursday. We travelled to Beaufort on a bright sunny morning, a pleasant trip with lots to see, i.e. dolphins in the waterway, some lovely homes, fishboats, and a barge which we met just as we approached the same bridge from different directions. Needless to say, we let him come through first! We had two more bridges, one 65' fixed, the other an opening bridge so were glad to have that behind us.

We came into the Beaufort Docks around noon, it was bright and sunny and much warmer than the last several days. We're tied up right in front of the town's main street, so are close to the shops and restaurants. We did however have to borrow the courtesy car to do the last of our provisioning and that was quite an experience . . . it was a late '70's Buick Estate Wagon, the grill was missing , we were instructed "do not lock the car" (not sure why), the windshield was broken, I could go on but you get the idea. However, it did get us there and back and we managed to fill the back with our provisions for the next 2 weeks. Doug and Rae got all their final preparations done, they deflated and lashed the dinghy, installed jack lines, secured everything in the seat lockers, and made arrangements with Chris Parker, our weather router. He will provide us with daily weather forecasts and routing advice throughout the passage. We will be departing tomorrow morning, Saturday Nov. 10. Winds are forcast to be light initially so we'll start out motoring, but more favourable winds are forcast after that. We'll plan to update every couple of days, but will likely report our position daily.