We spent a nice day in Wrightsville Beach. I got the whole day off from cooking and washing dishes. We ate all our meals out. None of them were that memorable, but it was better than cooking them myself! We walked (far!!) to the post office twice, saw the town museum, and walked for a while on the beach by the ocean.

We really wanted to get to South Carolina today but it was a long way – 51 miles! There was another place to anchor but it was too close to where we were already anchored. So we decided to get up and go early in the day and made it to our next anchorage in South Carolina before 3:30pm. It was a relatively warm day today which made it much easier to go the distance. We didn’t have to have any bridges open for us today, but we did have to spend some time on the Cape Fear River. Most of the time we were in narrow canals, usually with fancy houses on one side and marsh land on the other. The ocean was on the other side of the marsh land. The Cape Fear River is a lot bigger area of water that big commercial ships use. We did have to get out of the channel for one of the ships. What was more exciting than that though was when two big tug boats pushing barges came at us in one of the narrow canals. We moved as far over in the channel as we could but we can’t go in water that is shallower than 5 feet. That is how deep our boat is under the water line. The first tug was way too close to us, but the second one was even scarier. His load was very tall and we heard him tell the other tug boat driver that he couldn’t even see over it.

Our anchorage tonight is very close to the canal. We are in the Calabash River. We got here early enough, and it was warm enough, for us to take the dinghy down to go exploring. We stopped at the boat next to us and spent some time talking to the couple on it. We had met them already in Oriental. Then we got back in the dinghy and took it down the river to see Calabash. It is apparently a shrimping town. There were a lot of shrimp boats at the docks and a number of stands that advertised fresh shrimp. We tied the dinghy to a dock and went looking for some fresh shrimp. Unfortunately all the shrimp shacks were closed or sold out. We are hoping to find some to buy in the next few days. When we got back to the boat Bill took the picture above. That is our view for the night.