There has to be one of those days now and then.....

Sigh. We started with good intentions, up and ready to go at 6:45. Yes, that's A.M..... As dawn was just thinking of breaking, we were surrounded by gun shots! It was like being on a firing range! There were occasional squaks of ducks startled out of their slumbers. The shooting continued as the light increased. ---- duck hunting!!!! The hunters were EVERYWHERE, on all of the points of land around us, shooting into the air at ducks. We turned on the Christmas lights on the outside of the boat to be sure they saw us.

The morning started warm (upper 50's) and sunny. Looked great. So, we started our usual routine of raising the anchor. Then, the anchor windless died with the anchor half way up. So, Luke, the Engineer, went to work and of course, fixed it. But that cost us an hour or more. By then the fog had rolled in.

This was the first time we've had to get out the fog horn since Maine. Luke & I took turn nagivating via the GPS, chart plotter and radar or watching the canal and blowing the fog horn. Wickie loved it....

Along the river was a shrimp boat harbor. I love this picture of the shrimp boats in the fog.

The fog finally broke as we approached Oriental, NC. It's am amazingly small harbor, but they claim to have 3000 sailboats scattered throughout Oriental. Beats me where they hide them all. You can see both sides of the harbor in this photo of Latitudes.

Anyway, we stopped long enough to walk into town and pick up a package from the post office and grab lunch. The day was warm and sunny and perfect. By the time we ate lunch, the wind picked up, the skies opened and poured rain, and the temperatures dropped by at least 15 degrees. We were, naturally, dressed for the warm and sunny.

We walked back to the boat and left for an anchorage across the Neuse River. It was rough and rolly, but only a couple of miles wide. We're anchored now, warm, cozy, and relatively still. It's interesting that only now are we beginning to see more sailboats headed south. There are 3 others in the immediate anchorage area. One is from Canada, one from New Hampshire, and I don't know about the other. It was rainy and blowing when we got here. Maybe we can talk to them tomorrow before we leave for Morehead City.

One thing I love about getting further south along the NC coastal area is the pelicans. The Brown Pelican is common here, with their white neck plumage in the winter.

In fact, the entire bird population seems to be better here. We've also seen commorants, loons, lots of terns and seagulls, and hugh populations of some sort of short black duck with white sidewalls. Try as we can, we can't identify them.