The "gale" that was supposed to be here yesterday turned out to be a little less. Isn't that typical? When you expect less it turns out to be much more, such as with the Dec 3rd storm and when you expect a pounding it quite often turns out to be less. I'm not complaining. This one let us visit with our friends Mary Lou and Jay for an extra day and I think that we can still maintain our schedule. We will miss their company but they are setting off an a land based adventure to drive across the country to Colorado to visit one of their kids for Christmas. When they were talking about it last night it made me think that it would be a lot of fun to do the same across Canada this summer. We'll have to see.

We got off to a slightly later start that I would have liked this morning since we had to wait around until the office staff got here at the boat yard so we could settle up our bill with them, but then we were off. The start of the day's journey was a bit more eventful that I would have liked, dodging as we did a couple of phosphate barges and pusher tugs going the other way, but after we passed Moorehead City and got out into Bogue Sound it was a beautiful day to be on the water - sun shining, light winds, almost balmy temperatures.... there was absolutely nothing to complain about. Even the odd sport fisherman that passed us did so with courtesy and low wakes.

We passed the first of three possible problematic inlets, the Bogue Inlet. Those of you that have made this trip before understand that the inlets are the places where most of the shoaling takes place. In fact the US Army Corps of Engineers has pretty much a full time job keeping them clear and building spoil islands. Bogue Inlet wasn't too bad, in fact the only real problem according to TowBoatUS would be if you allowed yourself to get out of the channel which wouldn't be very hard since the ICW takes a funny jog right here and there is a buoy that looks like it should be part of the ICW but is really a marker for the inlet.

We made our trip to Swansboro arriving at 13h30 so we really could have continued to New River, but from the sound of the explosions it seemed that the Marines we exercising at Camp Lejune and we would not have been able to pass until they finished or took a break. Even if we were able to get through to New River Marina their rate was $1/ft without electricity whereas Duddly's is $0.75/ft with electricity, washrooms, shower, diesel at $2.30/gal which is the cheapest so far, and a courtesy car. You can't beat that! They even offered to drive us to one of three restaurants in the area for dinner if we wished, our choice which one and the restaurant would drive us back. This place definitely goes into the log as a worthwhile place to stop.