Washed up in Oriental
27 October 2009

After a calm night in the Pungo Creek anchorage we pulled anchor about 8.00am this morning and made full steam ahead for Oriental. We had a good day on the waterway and the miles passed easily enough. The rain held off although we had grey, cloudy skies all day. We made it to Oriental by 3.00pm and negotiated into our assigned slip at Deaton Yacht Services in time for a cup of tea. I have to say that we have been very impressed by the service here. We had been tied up for less than 30 minutes when Peter from Seacoast Electronics was stepping aboard to help sort out the depth sounder issue. I have to thank John Deaton for helping get Peter on the job so quickly. It turns out that this was one of those situations where it paid many times over to bring in the professional. Peter was able to determine that in fact it was not our 30 year old control unit that was bad but rather the 2 year old transducer! Sadly, this means it is not a cheap or easy fix. We will have to be hauled out to replace the transducer and of course we have some odd ball transducer that Peter does not have in stock. Thankfully he has been able to order one which should get here on Thursday. We are also having a new control unit put in as well as we just don't trust the old one any more. So we are on an enforced lay over for a couple of days. I suppose it serves us right because we had been looking at the forecast and planning on leaving Beaufort for an offshore leg on Thursday - obviously that is not going to happen so we will just have to wait and see what comes later in the week.