Swan Point to Southport, NC

Day #418; Loop Miles to Date = 4,710

We arose before dawn on Monday, which has its upsides and downsides...the downside is that it is EARLY...the upside is you get to see the sun rise!

We needed to leave on the hour (which in this case was 7am) in order to time a bridge opening at 9am. This particular bridge only opens on the hour, so missing it by a couple of minutes would mean waiting for an hour for the next opening. We arrived about 10 minutes early, so it all worked just fine. We had a rather long travel day...64 miles...which had a couple of bridges, some current, some shoals to deal with, and temporary channel markers in new places due to Hurricane Matthew. Basically, it meant that we had to pay attention, and not blindly follow the chart plotter. In the end, it was a rather uneventful day and we arrived in Southport around 2:30pm.

The Theresa Marie...one of many fishing trawlers we see in this stretch of the ICW.

So, today is Wednesday, and tonight will be our 3rd night here in Southport. It's a nice little town and a great marina. There is also a great boatyard here (Zimmerman's Marine) that we needed to take advantage of. About 3 weeks ago, we discovered a small leak in our exhaust system between the engine and the muffler. In simple terms, this meant that we had a small amount of cooling water and exhaust gases leaking from a joint where it wasn't supposed to be leaking. We put a temporary patch in place, which served us well for the last couple of weeks, but knew that we wanted to discover the root cause of the leak, and get it repaired. Which is precisely what we have been able to accomplish while here in Southport. As we pen this entry, the mechanic is down in the engine room putting pieces back together, and in a few minutes we will sea trial it to ensure that everything is back to being perfect.

Tomorrow morning we will be off again further south...our destination being Osprey Marina in the Myrtle Beach area. We haven't been able to make fixed longer term plans, because we frankly didn't know how long we would be held up with this repair. But, now that we are on the move tomorrow, we can start to put the next couple of weeks itinerary together and know better where we will land for Christmas.

All for now...thanks for reading.