What we thought would be a three and a half day trip turned into a four nights at sea with one minor storm. Overall it was a pretty good start to our sailing adventure on the new boat. Southport provided a nice marina with a long easy fuel dock for us to tie up to. We shared the dock with a couple other large cats and a 90 & 120ft power boats. We were tied up by 4:50pm. This is when I remembered that we need to check back into the US. Unfortunately it seems that customs now only works business hours and we were too late to get cleared in for the night leaving us stuck on the boat until about 8:15am when someone somewhere would come into work to approve our entry to the US via the app.
This was the night that we discovered that one of our water tank gauges was off. It had been reading 75% but never went down. I had thought the water maker was in an automatic mode and keeping it topped off. Turns out our water maker was not running correctly and the crew had just been clicking ok on the error code it displayed each time it attempted to run. Luckily before we left the Bahamas I had insisted we fill up our water tanks before we left. Otherwise we might have been a bit thirsty and no one would have been getting showers underway. Turns out our pre filters were clogged up and needed replacement. Once we got those swapped out the water maker worked like a champ for rest of our journey. Luckily we had a second set of tanks that were full and we were all able to still take showers on the boat that night. Just maybe not as long as we had hoped for :).
After being cleared in that morning we headed out to explore town a bit. We had passed by Southport when doing our Great Loop trip unfortunately missing one of the more active AGLCA members houses that have a standing invite for all loopers to come visit their font porch. I was a bit sad the first time we came through to miss it and really wanted to ensure we could stop by to say hi this time. As luck would have it they stopped by the marina to find us. We chatted for a bit, learned that their front porch had been made even more famous by a recent Netflix series called The Waterfront. Seems the show had even gone as far as renting their house to film there making their front porch truly famous. We stopped by for a visit getting some good suggestions on what to see & eat while in town for a couple nights.
After some good guidance we headed to the recommend open air bar ordering some really good cheeseburgers. Turns out this sign was needed as a few of the birds were pretty aggressive about their desire to share my french fries. The guy beside me actually punched one of the birds which seemed to intimidate the rest of them from trying for the remaining time it took to consume our meals. Afterwards we found the nearby ice cream shop and thoroughly enjoyed our Sundays nearly putting us all into food commas.
Coming into Southport we really had no plans for a next stop. We had talked about parking the boat somewhere in the outer banks for a month where it would be much cheaper then Charleston until we could get back to moving it to the Chesapeake Bay Area. We thought the bay might be a good place to leave it for the season. Making for a 7-8hr drive to use the boat vs 12+hr drive to North Carolina. But not knowing what the weather would do we did not want to make marina reservations we might have to cancel later possibly losing at least a deposit or more. The Southport area might have accommodated us for a month but we still had a full week of time available before we needed to get back home so we needed to make some plans to keep moving.
Looking at the weather it appeared we would have several good weather days. Unfortunately good in this case meant good traveling days but not good sailing days. After our most recent minor storm experience we were ok with little to no wind and some motor sailing. Looking at the chart it seemed like in about 3 days we could be in the Chesapeake. We started calling marinas looking for a long term home. Turns out this is not a great thing to be doing on a Sunday. Monday rolled around and we got confirmations from several of the bigger well known locations that they did not want to keep a boat our size for the rest of the season as it would block their ability to take in better paying transient boats. Luckily the same marinas that turned us away were also familiar with other marinas that were in the rebuilding stages thus less popular and able to accommodate us. It seemed we had two choices. One looked really empty as the dock manager took us out to the dock he was proposing via FaceTime and a bit challenging for us to get on and off our boat at. The next one sounded promising but they didn't have any pictures to share. However they offered to let us stay a couple nights to see if it was a fit. We now had a goal.
We went back to visit our friends & their famous porch again and they offered up a car allowing us to go shopping for provisions. At this point we were pretty low and frankly were hungry. By the time we left Walmart we were reminded that it's truly a bad idea to shop hungry. I think we filled an entire cart with food that only needed to feed us for the next 5-6 days. So after two nights in Southport we now had a new destination, a boat well stocked with food, and a good weather window to continue on. We truly enjoyed our time in Southport. We found some great food, it was nice to connect with folks that we meet a couple of times at the Great Loop conferences and we were now ready for the next leg of the trip.
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