Beaufort is one of those places that I could absolutely see myself calling home. Much like Cape May, it’s reminiscent of Cape Cod in little subtle ways that are hard to describe. Some are obvious – the National Seashore, the commercial fishing, the tourism – and others are more of a feeling. I love the strong environmental ties – Duke University and NOAA have research stations here.
While we were here, we celebrated Chris’s birthday. I made apple cinnamon pancakes for breakfast, and we took a morning walk around town. After work, we had painkillers at the tiki bar here at the marina and dinner at City Kitchen. We sat outside and were one of two tables since it was windy/chilly, but we had a perfect sunset view. Dinner was fantastic, but the sticky toffee pudding was to die for.
I took a boat tour to see the wild horses in the Rachel Carson Reserve, and I was really bummed that Chris couldn’t come with me. I saw three horses up close and four in the distance, plus a bunch of white ibis, great egrets, snowy egrets and little egrets, great blues, a little green heron and a little shore bird, possibly a semipalmated plover? The best part was that I realized if we got moving early, we could take Squall to do essentially the same trip as the tour since the horses are on Carrot Island, right across Taylor Creek. We got a beautiful sunrise and totally lucked out – there were four horses grazing near the water, and we saw another 10 off in the distance when we took the dinghy ashore and walked part of the island.
We got an electrician to check out the battery combiner, and he couldn’t figure out why it’s not working either so he called the manufacturer. Our combiner hasn’t been made in 10-15 years, and they think the unit is just dead, so we’ll be getting a new one and hopefully we can have it installed in Charleston. It would be really nice to be able to charge the house bank from the alternator again, especially when we’re running offshore and need to have all the instruments running for 24+ hours straight.
Thursday and Friday brought high winds with gusts into the low 40s at the highest, so we chose to stay an extra day and let the sea state settle. It was nice to have a weekend day to explore – we went out for breakfast, visited the farmers market, wandered through the Old Burying Ground (definitely worth a visit – lots of interesting history), bought far too many books at the nautically-themed gift and bookshop Scuttlebutt, and saw some of the artifacts recovered from Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge at the North Carolina Maritime Museum. On top of all that, we managed to get the boat prepped for our next hop and still had time to take our books over to the marina’s tiki bar for a couple painkillers at sunset.
Beaufort has been a great stop, and I’m looking forward to our trip tomorrow to Wrightsville Beach. We’re planning to jump offshore to avoid the Camp Lejeune area and some of the shoaling and cross-current issues we’ve heard about in the next stretch of the ICW. Had this weekend been more settled, we would have considered a hop straight to Charleston, since the days are getting so much shorter and we’re starting to see some chilly overnight temperatures, and we’re getting eager to be south before the cold catches up.
