Gale Creek (Hoboken Cut)

It was another cool night on the water, so it was hard to crawl out from under our warm covers to get up Easter morning. We still managed to get away slightly after 7 a.m.—and one of the other boats in the anchorage was long gone—we never did catch up with that classic boat, although we saw him in the distance, leaving the Neuse River, later in the afternoon.

We had planned a relatively short day, from Swansboro to Oriental. The plan was to get a pumpout for our holding tank, refuel, stock up on bagels at The Bean, get our walk and get any groceries or marine supplies we needed, since Oriental has these, close at hand. However, when we called the marina, they told us we had to go to Whittaker Creek for a pumpout. And, Whittaker Creek said that the place for the pumpout was closed today, but we could do selfserve. Wes decided we had enough fuel to get us to another marina, and that we had enough room in the holding tank, so we bypassed Oriental (and a short day) altogether, and headed for Gale Creek.

The nice thing about this was that the wind was behind us, and we decided to sail. No motor at all!! (wonderful…peaceful). There wasn’t more than about 10 knots of wind though, so after sailing slowly with just the jib, Wes put up the gennaker, and we took off. Not only were we sailing at 7-8 mph, it was no longer peaceful. We were screaming along…and, occasionally, Merlin heeled over quite a bit. When we left the Neuse river, though, we had to head into the wind, and turn the motor back on for those 80 minutes.

Throughout the day, we had 3 separate dolphin sightings, one with 4-5 dolphins. As we left the Neuse River, and again, in Gale Creek, we saw gannets. This anchorage, despite being right off the ICW, was very peaceful, with a lovely sunset. We did have some mosquitoes, until we were smart enough to put up our screens and light the bug candle. There were at least 3 points of land in this area, and a house on each. We wondered if the residents knew each other—they were just a short water crossing away, but probably miles by road.


Our lat/long to look us up on Google Earth at Swansboro is: 35°12.613'N 076°35.469'W.

The picture is of the first bald eagle we saw on the trip north—on April 1st.