It would be my luck to get stuck on the same coil on my way through in the other direction.
I came to a drawbridge that was destined to be exactly 1/2 hour out of sequence. When I calculated my speed and its distance, the only thing to do was throttle back. I still had a 15 minute wait till the top of the hour. On I went through another area of private homes with private piers. One older house was dwarfed by its pier. It looked like maybe this owner would demolish it and built something more in proportion.
Soon I was noticing my speed being affected by a current. Looking ahead on the chart I saw Cape Fear River was next and I was being drawn into it. The northeast wind was still strong and I had to motor into it all the way up this river and buck the current too. There were several large ships using the channel, those going downstream were flying, those like me going upstream were crawling. I approached Snow's Cut, a canal taking the intracoastal further north. It also carried a strong current and I began flying along as darkness fell, running down this narrow canal. At its end is a town and some room to anchor. This time it was too difficult to navigate in the dark so I spent the night there. It was chilly again and slow going to get underway in the morning.
The current and wind were opposed which kept a strain on the anchor line. I had to motor ahead a little bit, pull in the slack, tie it off, then go back to the helm and motor ahead again.
Once I got going and checked the charts I could see I was a day and a half from Beaufort. It irked me that there was no way I could do the rest of this leg in less than 2 days.
I continued past Topsail Beach, a day away from Beaufort, and noticed that a tug with a barge was overtaking me. I pulled into a gas dock as they passed, but it wasn't open. I continued and made a decision to try to keep up with the tug as it became dark. The bridges would open for a commercial vessel and I could follow behind if I could keep up close enough. Also the tug needed more depth in the channel, if I stayed with it I'd be in deep water.
I was able to keep up at full throttle. I worried about the motor and if it would stand up to the higher speed. Also would my fuel hold out. I hadn't run it at this speed for any length of time and I didn't know what the fuel consumption would be.
We went through some nasty turns and through a bridge. The tug had to slow to make the turns and I could cut the corners a little bit. It kept pulling ahead though on the straight sections. Eventually it slowed down about a half knot and I could keep up. It got dark and the daymarkers for the channel would loom up, illuminated my my nav lights. They would be only about 50 feet away when they appeared. It became risky to go into the pilothouse to look at the computer chart. The visibility was just a little bit more difficult when I was inside and I feared running into one of these daymarkers. They consist of a sign on a piling and they are not lit. The green square markers would show up in my green starboard nav light and the red triangles, which seemed nastier somehow, would pop up on the port side, lit by my red nav light.
We began a series of screwy turns and I began to get more fearful of continuing behind the tug, but where would I stop? The channel was narrow and I could end up on the right side of it on a sandbar or mudbank and on the left was a series of docks right on the edge of the channel. I chose one and tied up for the night. It was a relief to finally quit that crazy race with the tug.
In the morning I listened to the radio for a while before beginning to make breakfast. Beaufort was only a few hours away. I was near Swansboro or Southport. I was down to 2 eggs and an onion for the omelet, no cheese. I heard someone yell "Yoohoo". Now that was odd. It was an elderly lady. I popped my head out of the cabin and said hello. I must have looked quite a sight, unshaven and hair all mussed up.
She said her husband had been down earlier and called to see if anyone was aboard and then they called the Coast Guard, wondering if someone had DIED on that boat! She continued talking about the boats coming up and down the channel. What a busybody. I was boiling water for the coffee when the Coast Guard arrived and frying the onions. I kept popping up and talking with them, then going back down to continue my gourmet breakfast. I didn't have to say much to them, the lady filled them in on every detail I had told her and she continued to talk their ears off about how this boat and that boat were going too fast in the channel, look at that one, it's leaving too big of a wake, etc. It didn't take long for them to size up the situation and politely make their getaway. I too got underway and continued north through Bogue Sound, past Morehead City, and into Beaufort harbor. There was ex-Mannini Pahi, John Russell's Cool Change, a Wharram Oro to greet me.
I was able to shift from anchor to Captain Rob's mooring. The chilly weather was now warm and I told everybody I had brought the Florida Keys weather up with me.