TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Captain Christian started to get the boat on the way just by himself at 6:30. When Anne heard the engine she knew that it’s was time to wake up. The sun rose in a perfect blue sky, it is beautiful.

First we pass Southport town and Cape Fear River to return to the Intracoastal Waterway. There is a very strong head wind (22 knots)! It takes an hour, but luckily a tidal current helps us progress forward at 8 knots. Later we reach the Intracostal that passes through two banks that look like pines covered sand dunes. Our trip becomes again a leisure cruising. The Intracoastal Water way gets us into Wrighsville’s seaside resort. We wait in a maritime traffic jam: it’s the cruising and water entertainment rush hour for Americans in W.E: jet skis, sail boats, fast cruises, small ones and big ones, catamarans…and we even suspect that there is a submarine. Despite all these obstacles the Woza Moya flies like an amazing dolphin. But two hours later, a stubborn bridge, 20 feet of vertical clearance, blocks the mast and we have to make a U turn and wait 30 minutes… The boat is sailing now at an average of 7 knots and sometimes the current pushes us.

The scenery turns again to natural and salvages landscape: tidal, meadow in middle water, reeds, some dolphins fishing and a lot of ospreys. Around 7pm we discover in front of us a last little bridge that we missed on the map: it’s Swing Bridge, close to the mile marker 260, 10 feet of vertical clearance. When the bridge starts to open suddenly two small military high speed inflatable boats appear in front of us! They transport young commandos in action that were muscular and didn’t miss Juliette, our top model crew.

Finally at 8:30 after sailing an hour and a half in a beautiful and peaceful sunset we reach Swansboro, the last over night docking of our trip. Today we beat our record and sailed a distance of 9.5 miles. This was 14 hours of sailing (for average speed, you make the math yourself…) but time was flying by and we didn’t even notice time pass! We celebrated that with a locally made Lunapops (a heartier version of popsicles) and drinks in a dockside bar. That’s all folks…