Adventures on Beannacht

Well we arrived safely in Oriental so we’re not completely useless on the water. Good to know.

We travelled down from an anchorage off the Pamlico Sound on Monday morning and pulled up in the slip at lunchtime. Our second night setting anchor wasn’t as smooth as the first, and we ended up following Ghost Dance into a new anchorage after dark, following a conversation over the VHF about the weather. Rob, Joanne and Graham on Ghost Dance are good banter, dope smoking Canadians, and we’ve really enjoyed hanging out with them and learning from them. 

Arriving at Sailcraft was challenging, the channel into Whitacker Creek, just north of Oriental, was really narrow, with depths of less than 7 feet. Our boat ‘draws’ 5’6″, so Kel was glued to the depth sounder as she steered us in. We’d been hailing the yard on the VHF from 5 miles out, but couldn’t get a response, so we just tootled in very slowly hoping that someone would be there to meet us. And to our amazment and delight there were about 10 willing volunteers, a couple of local boat owners, Alan the yard owner, Mark our rigger, and Bert one of the yard’s long term staff and a life long Oriental native. The sense of peace we got from arriving in a yard and being instantly greeted by those friendly and helpful faces was deep and has lasted.

The yard wasted no time in getting us out of the water, first unstepping the mast, and then lifting us on the travel lift. We thought that watching the boat be hauled was nerve-racking, but yesterday we got the real treat – dropping the keel. Our keel weights 5,000 lbs, and is held on by 20 bolts. If you lose your keel whilst on the water, which does happen, the boat immediately inverts and won’t right itself – ‘come in International Rescue’ time. Having a doubt in the back of our mind about the integrity of our keel is not an option, it’s a costly process, but this was one of the essential tasks before we head offshore.

The list of tasks to be completed before we can safely leave the US coast and head out to shore is long enough, and we’ve been working hard getting through those as quickly as we can. Boat yards are expensive places to reside, and already we’ve uncovered a couple of blips that will cut into the cruising budget a little, like the need to replace our drive shaft, and change our transmission coupling.

The first blip was on the way down when I discovered our holding tank, that’s essentially our septic tank on the boat, wasn’t working. I’ll allow the motion picture to do the talking, it’s fair to say that I’d rather have been doing other things…

So back to work, this morning order lots of marine related toys – all necessary unfortunately, I’d love to be ordering fun stuff, but on our budget it’s the essentials only, and maybe a Christmas present or two given that we’re in Oriental for Christmas on our own this year.