Bill always does an incredible job of planning our anchorages. When it is possible, we are trying to stop at different places than we have before. Bill has recently come up with another criteria for choosing the anchorages toward the end of the week. He found a website that shows where all the TV antennas are located. Now he analyzes how good the TV reception will be for watching the football games we want to watch on Sunday as part of the decision making process.

With that as a guide we turned into Southport, North Carolina yesterday to see if we could get one of the free docks, or anchor in the harbor. The plan was to spend the night there and then leave early this morning to go to Calabash Creek in South Carolina where it was likely that the TV reception would be better.

There were a couple of free docks next to the Provisions restaurant and we decided not to try for them. If you don’t stop the boat fast enough your bow is inside the restaurant – too much pressure for us. They say there is room for three boats to anchor in the harbor but there was a big catamaran in the middle. Just at that moment though the catamaran pulled up its anchor and moved over to another free dock on the other side of the harbor. We went for their spot. It took us three times to set the anchor but we finally did.

After we got settled we went over to meet the people on the catamaran. We knew they had been with us in Beaufort but we hadn’t met them. We spent some time getting acquainted. We even got a tour of their boat, which is incredible. Catamarans have so much more living space than mono hull boats. They have spent a lot of time in Southport so we ended up going to lunch with them and seeing some of the town. We checked out the maritime museum and visitors’ center. Southport is where the chick flick Safe Haven was filmed last year. They are very proud of that.

When we got back to the boat we checked out the channels that the football games would be on today and decided to spend Sunday here too. The reception was good and we figured a known good was better than whatever we might find in the next location. Not to mention that now we could go to breakfast at a restaurant and have pizza delivered to the dock to eat during the games. Neither of which would be possible at Calabash Creek.

Southport is a nice town. We are sitting in the middle of mostly fishing boats. Above is an example of our view. On the way to breakfast this morning we checked out some of the historic sites in town. I also discovered that we are now far enough south for palm trees. I’m very excited about that.

I’ve put some pictures of our trip so far this season in our Photo Gallery. Please go check them out.