Sat Sept 5: Coinjock Marina to Atlantic Yacht Basin

 In which we leave the Carolinas behind....

 

We left Coinjock Marina in the care of the majestic Shiba Inu surveying his domain.... The owner says a typical Shiba Inu behaves like a cat.  That sounds like the best kind of dog there is!

 

The dockmaster had told us the wind was going to come up - and he wasn't wrong.  Probably if we had know it would be that choppy on the Currituck Sound we would have chickened out...so it was good we didn't.  Time passed - we made it.  Maybe next time an extra Bonine would be a good idea.  We had been warned that going the Dismal Swamp route is best, but we had already seen that route and I don't like Rick to get too unstressed so I wanted to come the other way around, on a new route.  And it was lovely.  After we got through the sound and the wind calmed down.  

 

We met this barge on a shallow narrow corner, which would have freaked us out in the old days. This time Rick just nonchalantly radioed him and he said 'I'll meet you on the 1' and we knew that meant port to port and it was a cake walk.  

 There were several bridges to time, but we are old hands at that now so we arrived at Atlantic Yacht Basin no problem.  I'd had such a successful time docking yesterday that I wanted to rest on my laurels a bit, so Rick took us in.  Which was a good thing because they wanted to shoehorn us onto the face dock between two awfully nice boats.  The space appeared to get smaller and smaller the closer we got to it - it looked like there was no way that yarn was going to fit through that needle.  But Rick made it look easy - and we made it!

We will leave the boat here a couple of days, as we wait for them to come back from the long weekend and help install a new solenoid for the windlass.  Fingers crossed.  We are also looking into covered winter boat storage here, so we looked around the yard a bit.  I guess we both expected something a little more high-tech; basically it's gigantic barns for boats.

Virginia welcomed us with a lovely sunset - and with no temperatures in the 90s this week!