It is November 1, 2011 and we are just getting started on our next cruising trip. We cruised from May 2010 until June 2011, but took a break from blogging. After getting comments from several friends about “missing our boating adventures”, we realized that some of you actually look forward to our blogs. We’ll try to do better in the future and we’ll even do several “sorry you missed this” picture shows of some of last years trips. One of our accomplishments was that we finished the Great Loop after only ten years. We realize that most people do it in one year, but we probably “stopped and smelled the roses” a lot more than many cruisers. For those of you who don’t know what the Great Loop is, the red lines on the map below show the routes that “Loopers” usually follow in order to circumnavigate the eastern United States and Canada. The black routes show alternate routes. The yellow lines show the places we ventured that are not part of the usual loop. It has been a wonderful experience and we have made so many new friends and have seen many fantastic sights.
Our last blog ended with our boat stored for the winter in Leland , North Carolina . Perhaps we didn’t give the particulars of the shed before, but it was 200’x300’ and the height was 30 feet.
It was a shed used for doing maintenance on boats, but since the economy was slow for boating industries, Harbour Reach was the only full time boat in the shed and her space in the middle of the shed featured a well built set of stairs leading to the cockpit. It made for much comfort when we arrived in Leland and when we worked on many boat projects for the first month. Bill had not told me how many boat projects there would be, but we finally got underway by mid-May, phew!
It was somewhat nerve-wracking to see what a tight fit the boat on the travel-lift was with the exit door, but it made it with inches to spare.
Our first stop was Bald Head Island in North Carolina . It is a sparsely populated island, but has up-scale houses and a well filled harbor.
We climbed to the top of the lighthouse.
On the beach we saw many cabbage jellyfish which are quite different from the more common jellyfish that have long stinging tentacles. In fact they look like a cabbage!
There were many fiddler crabs on the bay shoreline. These crabs have one big claw that someone must have thought looked like a fiddle.
As we moved up the waterway we were treated to marine water maneuvers near Camp Lejeune , NC . There were lots of small boats practicing many of the same things boaters do. In addition shooting sounds or practice bombing maneuvers could be heard from twenty miles away. We appreciate all the work that our marines go through to be prepared to protect our nation.

We spent several days walking the beach, watching the fishermen catch fish, nurse sharks, and stingrays, and also enjoying the sunsets.
Many visitors stopped by to see our boat and to ask questions about our lifestyle of living on a boat. Bob and Clare, one of the visiting couples who live in Oriental, invited us to their home for dinner that night. We biked to their lovely home and had a delicious chicken salad dinner with strawberry shortcake for dessert, (one of my favorites). We learned that he is an artist. He gave us a copy of one of the pictures that he had painted.. Meeting local people and hearing about them and the town they live in is one of our favorite pastimes when visiting towns by boat.
People watching is always fun and animal watching is also fun, but sometimes it goes beyond fun. The next picture shows a snake getting ready to eat an eel. We watched the snake swim across the water, catch the eel, maneuver his way up onto a low dock, (Not the dock we were tied to!), and hold the eel down with his body. After shooting this picture we couldn’t watch any longer, but it does suggest part of the animal food chain.


If you would like to hear their song “Hard Times Come No More”, you can open this website. You do not have to download the song to play it, just be sure the volume button on your computer is on and click the play button.
http://www.molassescreek.com/home.cfm
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Molasses Creek |
We continued along the outer banks to the village of Hatteras where we docked near the car ferry landing. There were so many car ferries coming to Cape Hatteras National Seashore that it took us less than thirty minutes to decide that this wasn’t the marina for us
We went to the next harbor and stayed at Teach’s Liar Marina. Edward Teach was Blackbeard’s real name, but the owners didn’t seem to be pirates, so we docked just before a big storm came through.

The next day we packed up our bikes and took a taxi to the Hatteras Lighthouse and museum. This is the tallest lighthouse in
The
We had a good view of the lighthouse keeper’s house from the top of the light house.
There are five lighthouses on the outer banks. We managed to climb all but one which was under construction. The exercise was exhilarating and the views were superb. If you are healthy and wanting good views, we highly recommend climbing these lighthouses.
Having explored all of


When going north on the ICW there are two possible routes, one route through the Dismal Swamp and one closer to the ocean. Each year there is talk of closing the waterway through the Dismal Swamp because of government financing. We decided to take that one while it is still open for boats. We definitely think the area is misnamed. It is anything but dismal, in fact on a sunny day it is spectacular!
There is an interesting visitors’ center and nature center in a section where boaters can tie up to the wall for the night. We stayed there for a night and then took the dinghy up to Lake Drummond to see what it looked like. Much to our surprise there was a small dinghy trailer that was set up on tracks to carry your dinghy up a small hill, across the top of the hill and then down to the Lake . One of us walked along side the boat and the other operated the controls. It reminded us of the Big Chute on the Trent Severn Waterway in Canada that took our big boat out of the water, across the road, up a hill, and then down to the river below. We nicknamed the dinghy lift in the Dismal Swamp Little Chute.