Yes, It’s Saturday as I write about Thursday. But, it’s difficult to write after running the boat for 7 hours. I mean you are pretty exhausted.

We left Coinjock Marina about 7AM and it was misty and a slight fog which steadily got worse as we proceed south. We were the only boat headed south The snow bird boats are all headed back to CT, NY, MA and other northerly ports for the summer and will head back south this fall. But, we are headed south. We will pass more boats headed north as we head south in the fog. I turn on the fog horn and running lights when the visibility drops. My AIS lets me know the AIS equipped boats that are headed my way and how many minutes it is until we meet. I call a few of the boats on the radio and tell them to keep their starboard side near the edge of the channel heading north and I’ll do the same heading south to give us the most meeting space. Most everyone is going slow. I d see a boat coming my direction going 22 knots. I have no idea why anyone would run that fast in fog. But as we get closer to meeting he slows to 6 knots. After he passes he goes back up to 22 knots. Probably a delivery captain. As we enter the Albemarle Sound we turn left to head to Roanoke Island and I not longer am in the ICW channel. There are hardly any targets on my AIS screen and they are miles away heading in other directions. We deal with dodging some crab pots, but there aren’t many of those and the fog is getting better. About 11AM I turn off the fog horn.

It’s a really nice calm day when we enter the Manteo harbor and dock. We have reservations at what was supposedly a nice slip. I tell the dock hand that it is too dangerous for us to get on and off the boat at that slip. He tells me about another and it is not good either but we tie up anyway. We cannot use our gates to get off the boat. Instead we have to climb over the railing and take a leap of faith that our knees will not buckle upon landing on the finger pier. Hey, we are not as nimble as we used to be. Manteo has nice restaurants and we eat dinner at Poor Richards. Susan has shrimp wrap and I have rockfish sandwich.

Friday is maintenance and a few groceries are needed too. Suz and I hike to the Ace Hardware and Piggly Wiggly grocery stores. My shore power cord has overheated and melted the inlet on the cord. I cut the socket off the cord and directly wire it to the boat. It should probably be that way anyhow as everyone has this overheating probably where the shore power connects with a plug and socket that just cannot carry AC loads. I may leave it wired this way as we seldom have a need to un-hook the shore power cords.

We have dinner at the Lost Colony Tavern. Fish and chips for me with local ribbon fish - excellent! Susan has some form of Sheppards Pie. We get back to the boat and stream the last episode of 1883. It’s really a good series.

Today’s picture is Jockey’s Ridge as seen from the Roanoke Sound side. Does it look 100’ tall from this side?