Trial by Drawbridge
27 April 2012 | Camp LeJeune Beach, NC
When we left Dockside this morning we had to go through one drawbridge immediately that opens only on the hour. The next drawbridge was 5 miles away and it opens on the half hour. Really pushing it we can go 9.5 mph or so, but we were at the front of the line through the first bridge so we put the throttle all the way down. There was a trawler in front of us a little bit so we thought the drawbridge would open for him, giving us just enough time to catch up. However, when we were three minutes from the bridge one minute before the half hour, we heard the trawler call the bridge to say that he was just short enough that he did not need an opening. The bridges have to open exactly on their scheduled time so that meant since we were three minutes away he could not open for us. We got to try to stay in one place for a half hour until the top of the hour for him to open for us. The next bridge was 18 miles further away but opened on the hour. Although we could do the 18 miles in about 2-1/4 hours that meant that we would miss the opening two hours away by about 15 minutes and the next opening would be still 45 more minutes away. Our only choice was to slow down and stretch our travel time for the 18 miles to three hours. We made that with time to spare and continued on towards our destination. As were were getting close we had to travel through a section that made a sharp left angle turn, went about a half mile, made a turn back parallel to our original course, made another sharp angle right, and then turned back on our original heading. Just before we got to that section, a large power yacht blew by us without slowing down as he should to not wake us badly. When we got to the second sharp turn we saw he had missed the turn and run straight off into the mud and was sitting pretty much out of the water. To make his mistake even worse, the tide had just started going out so here he was aground, and was going to wait at least 12 hours to even get back to the same tide level he ran aground at. Even at that it was going to take some real tow boat work to get him off. Just a reminder that haste makes waste, and in this case probably cost a lot of boat bucks! We continued on and arrived at our planned destination which is a very nice harbor made by the marines to provide landing craft training at Camp LeJeune. Most of the time it is empty except for the boats traveling the that stop by overnight. We are anchored here with four other boats toinight. The above picture is from our boat looking out the well marked entrance from the ICW. Tomorrow we travel to Beaufort, NC just in time for a wine and cheese festival! The Captain.